


Across These Days Like Deserts

by vailkagami



Category: Terminator (Movies), The Terminator (1984)
Genre: Character Death, Dark, F/M, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, lots of dark and unpleasant things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-03-26 09:18:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 35
Words: 329,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3845533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1997, the world ends right on schedule. In 2029, the war is won.<br/>In between those events are 32 years, and both the fear and the hope that the future is not written in stone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1997

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes of various things:
> 
>  **Canon:** This story is following the canon of the very first Terminator movie from 1984. It it not compliant with any of the ones coming later, not even the second one. It does, however, use elements from them - from all over the place, really. Kate Brewster is in it, and she has a lot in common with her counterparts from the third and fourth movie, but it could be argued that she is a different character from them. So is her father. So are a lot of other people, including John Connor. Because he did not actually appear in the first movie - this is basically my interpretation of the character based on the information given in that movie and influenced by other sources. Some details are taken from the novellization by Frakes and Wisher, like the fact that the future uses the metric system, but it's not entirely compliant with that, either.
> 
>  **Posting:** The story will be updated every two weeks. At the time of me writing this, it is already more than 40,000 words long. It will be much longer than that. The slow but regular updates make sure that I will have enough time to finish more chapters and stay ahead of schedule. In my experience, it is a more reliable way to keep the story going than posting a new chapter whenever one happens to be done.
> 
>  **Writing:** I do not have a beta for this fic and English is not my first language. There will be mistakes.  
>  I am also writing about a lot of things, mostly concerning science and military, that I have only a very vague understanding of, if that. If you are a medical student prone to violent outbusts when someone Does It Wrong, better stay away. I am taking a lot of artistic licence here.
> 
> The title is taken from _The Ballad of the White Horse_ by G.K. Chesterton.  
>  There will be more tags later, which also fuction as warnings. I am aware that I am mostly talking to myself here, but if you happen to be someone actually willing to read this story, keep an eye on those tags. Things will get pretty unpleasant.

On August 29 1997, the world ended right on schedule. It was a Friday. Later, John Connor would remember this detail like all the other survivors because it was the last time anyone on the planet gave a fuck about what weekday it was.

At the time, John did not care about the weekday (the last one), or what time it was (seven sixteen in the evening), or what country he was in (Argentina). All he cared about that very moment, as the bombs dropped, was his mother's screams, and then his mother's silence. He barely heard, but would always remember her last words for him, useful at the beginning and important at the end ( _Never stop frighting, you will win, you know it. Never forget that I love you._ ) and then her final word which was not for him, probably, and scattered away like her ashes moments later when the next shock wave hit and made her part of the dust they would all breathe in for years to come.

After the fact, for a long time, he only felt numb. There was a distant knowledge in the back of his mind that he had to go, that he wasn't safe, wasn't _useful_ here; that he was a long way from where he needed to be. But what was the point, if he was also a very long way from _who_ he needed to be? The world depended on him to save it – the _entire world_ – and he was just a kid who, until but moments ago, had thought that his mother was somehow able to bend reality and save the world all on her own.

But the one _meant_ to save the world was him. He _had to_ save it, had to be the great, bright leader of mankind just like his mother had trained him to be. John knew he he had to fill that role, but he couldn't. He had been raised with the knowledge, grown up preparing, but now that it had become real, the mere idea was crushing. He was no hero and no savior. He couldn't be, could save and give hope to no one. He was twelve years old, and he was crying, and he wanted his mom.

It was a long time before he moved again, and when he did, the wold was dark, the sky black in a way he had never seen before. He could see because the ground was on fire.

His mother had taken him up into the hills, away from the city, and it had saved him, if not her. _She_ had saved him, and deep inside the only part of him still capable of feeling was the part clinging to the belief that she had done it not just because he was supposed to be the savior of mankind but also because he was her son. ( _Never forget that I love you._ ) He looked down onto the dying city where a distant skyscraper was just now collapsing into the sea of dust and fire and wondered if this was what his mom had seen in her nightmares every night for as long as he could remember.

Ashes began to fall, like snow. It brought up another memory, and with it came the despair that was only slowly gnawing its way through the blanket of numbness and loss. Kyle Reese, the man from the future who had told John's mother about the war and John's role in it, had spoken of the nuclear winter that followed the initial attack, how those who survived the bombings froze to death, and those who didn't freeze died of starvation. John was looking down onto the carcas of a world that hadn't realized yet that it was already gone.

At some point between the first sighting of missiles on his mother's radar and the moment the second shock wave turned her and their surroundings into dust, John had missed his world's last sunset.

Somewhere down in that inferno were survivors. In the surrounding villages, too. As much as he felt like it, John knew he wasn't the only person left in the world. The number of nukes to rain down onto Earth was finite, and the city, this area hadn't been important enough to warrant more than one. John pushed away all thoughts of the rest of the world where it looked just like this or worse. Everywhere. John pushed the thoughts away and thought of the people around him, somewhere in this darkness of smoke and dust. Shocked, terrified, lost, and ignorant of the fact that the worst was yet to come. Who didn't know about the machines, could only wonder what they had done to bring this upon them. Who stood among the flames and didn't know that all too soon, it would grow cold.

Who were calling for help and had no way of knowing that help would never come.

It was too much to take in. John only now got a glimpse of the despair that had overwhelmed his mother the moment it became clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all their increasingly desperate attempts to prevent the death of billions had failed. Somehow, John had never really been able to believe that this would really happen. It had been unfathomable.

Cold, starvation – and eventually the machines that would work hard and methodically to get rid of the leftovers of mankind. Going so far as to turn able-bodied humans into their slaves to help with their own extinction. The fate that awaited the people of Earth was so bleak and terrible that even now, John's mind refused to picture it, tried to hide behind a wall of paralyzing despair. He fought it down, forced himself to focus on something smaller, something his mind could handle. Things that were important right here and now. The people in that valley who were still alive needed to know what was going on so they would know to prepare for the cold, dark years that were to come and stocked up on ammo. He had to share what knowledge and what training he had, so that maybe some of them had a chance. Slowly, haltingly, John made his way down the scorched hill towards the nearest village.

He vaguely remembered running past trees on the way up to the shelter. Those that still stood were burned, what few leaves remained were covered in ash, all color gone. That was what this world was now, what it had not been not a mere hour ago: Colorless, ruined. It hit John that the children born after this day might never see a healthy tree, a bird flying by, the sun. They might never know what it meant not to be hungry, or cold, and they might never know what it meant to feel safe.

It hit him, suddenly, that some ten years down the line, this was the world his father would be born into.

Taught knowledge and logic had not prepared him for this. Until today, until an hour ago, the future Reese had described to John's mother had been a different planet to John, something that might just as well have been a different universe. He had never been able to reconcile it with the world he'd grown up in (Past tense – he was no longer growing up, couldn't allow himself to be. As of this moment he had to be grown up.), never been able to imagine that one day _this_ world would turn into _that_ world. Now it had. And John was all alone in it. Later he would come to realize that so was everyone else.

Many things would hit him in the days and weeks to come. The loss of everything he had known was so fundamental that he couldn't take it in at once. Things so big he never even realized they were there, small things that he had taken for granted. His mother had told him never to do that but he he had, anyway, inevitably. Most of all because he had taken for granted that his mother was invincible and would never allow the disaster she had trained him for to happen.

Most of all, he had taken for granted that his mother would always be with him.

This loss, too, was something that would hit him in waves. Stumbling down the hill towards the village, mostly intact but on fire, John already knew this. The knowledge would not help him brace himself against the crushing grief when it came.

Right now, as he heard the first voices calling for help, he pushed all those thoughts aside, buried them deep, and ran towards the flames.

 

-

 

Katherine Brewster had been in Texas when the world ended, visiting her father who had been stationed there since June, and this was what saved her life. A bunker was nearby, close enough to reach it before the bombs hit. It saved her father and her, but not her mother and little brother, who had been out shopping at the time. For days there had been no certainty about their fate because the survivors were stuck below the ground when all Kate wanted to do was claw her way to the surface and find Mom and Charlie. When they finally were allowed to go up and saw the devastation with their own eyes, they still had no certainty, but also no hope.

What had destroyed the city had also destroyed any remains of her family's bodies. With no evidence, Kate needed months to accept that they were gone. When she finally did, she stopped talking. For a while she stopped everything.

The world was in ruins and Mom was gone, her baby brother was gone, and there was no hope of this ever, ever going away.

Her father was gentle with her when he had the time to be anything at all. For a while Kate hated him for being able to function after his wife and son had died. Then she hated herself for the opposite. In the end she pulled herself together, because this wasn't going away but everyone was still doing their best, applying what skills they had to this new situation, and Kate wasn't helping. If she wanted to live in this new order – and she still wasn't certain that she did – she had to start pulling her own weight. If only to make life a little less difficult for everyone else.

For a while, when she shut herself in, Kate had felt like she, her father, and the other military men and women were the only people left in the world. The moment she left the room she shared with her dad she found that this was not the case. There were others, filling the unoccupied parts of the bunker in increasing numbers. Others, who were scared, confused, grief-stricken like she was, lost, alone, angry and hopeless. There was a lot of talk flying around, of who'd done this, what should be done in reconciliation once the government had pulled its shit together. Talk of lost parents, children and homes. There was not a single positive emotion to be found.

By the time Kate walked among them, talk had started of sickness and how the food rations were getting smaller and smaller. A few days later, talk started about how anyone arriving at their gates now should be turned away.

A week later, anyone arriving at their gate was.

Her father justified the decision to her when she raged against it, but she could tell that he didn't love it either, and that was what kept her from hating him again. Not much, anyway. He didn't like it. But he also didn't fight it, and his reasoning sounded so _logical_. So cold. She hated that it made sense. There simply was no way for this bunker and it's meager supplies, meant for just a chosen few, to sustain any more people. They were already straining to sustain the ones already inside.

She hated that she thought he was right when the fights started to break out among the survivors inside. Everyone had always taught her that humans were meant to live in communities and needed each other to survive, but all notions of community, it seemed, went out of the window the moment there was not enough for everyone. Kate stayed away from the others once it started. She noted that her own food rations were getting smaller and vowed never to complain.

Those initiating fights, those caught stealing were throw out by the soldiers. The soldiers always carried weapons always moved in groups. There was an incident once, that Kate heard about later. Hungry people attacked a few soldiers and tried to take their weapons. Some were killed. It was ugly and it made everything even worse.

Opening the gates to remove those who endangered others was dangerous, too, but not as much as initially feared. The people outside did not pose much of a threat because there weren't a lot of them. New arrivals stopped coming. Eventually, Kate realized that the ones inside and those few outside were all there were left.

She finally worked up the courage to ask her dad, when she could. He usually disappeared, for days on end, in the control center of the bunker that she had only been allowed into the day everything went away and had not been able to work up an interest for in the weeks that followed. Now she started banging doors, arguing with guards that would not let her through. Her father did not appear to order them to let her in, but he came out to tell her that she was to go back to their room and he would come as soon as he could, Which turned out to be two days later.

Kate did not wait in their room staring at the walls all that time. This phase was over and there was no going back to it. But there also was no going to her dad who had no time for her, and no going to the camp inside the bunker with all the lost people who were frightening in their desperation. She went to the kitchen instead, to see for herself how badly diminished their stock on food was. But no one would tell her. They dismissed her questions or made up platitudes that were supposed to sound comforting but made her understand that they were screwed. “Why don't we get more food from outside?” she asked the female solider guarding the stock room, who was willing to talk to her after Kate tricked her into believing she knew exactly what was going on. “There has to be something left somewhere.”

“That is very likely. We did send out teams to restock supplies. They must be back very soon.”

Supplies were short not only since yesterday. They must have tried to restock days, if not weeks before. So what Kate heard now was that they had send out teams to get food and they had not returned.

It was one more thing she would ask her father about. Before she got the chance to do that, her way led her to the medical facilities of the bunker and for the first time she got a look at those who did not have the luck to escape this bombs mostly unscratched or die instantly.

For a while Kate froze, simply staring at the scene before her: For or five tired looking men and women running around between a few beds and a lot of improvised cots containing people who bled, sported burns, were missing limps. There were hurried voices and commands but mostly there were subdued moans and muffled crying, as if the suffering didn't want to disturb the dying with the verbalization of their distress. The stagnant air smelled of chemicals, blood, human waste, and more than anything of burned flesh.

When she remembered how to move, Kate fled. Ran to the isolated sanctuary that was her room and hid her face in her pillow. For a long time, she cried. Her father didn't come.

She didn't sleep that night, the scene in medical playing over and over in her mind. All the injured, all the sick. How hopeless the few helpers had seemed in the face of so much human misery. The silence inside the room that was small but was all hers no longer felt like a blessing. It felt like an accusation.

The next morning she went back to medical and offered to help. No one turned her away because she was young. Later that day, she held a dying man's hand and then helped carry him to the chamber where the bodies were kept until someone had time to taken them to the surface.

She worked all day and until deep into the night. Somewhere in between she got hungry – so hungry, eventually, that she felt sick, and when she was given her ration for the day she ate it, for the first time, with appreciation, but also with dread.

When she finally returned to her room that night, her father was waiting for her. He was asleep on his bed, but the uniform he was still wearing and the uncomfortable position told her that he had been trying to stay awake for her. Kate didn't feel sorry for making him wait, as he had made her wait much more than that. She even felt grim satisfaction for a moment, but then she identified the emotion as childish, and she couldn't be a child any longer.

She'd had a classmate once, years ago, who had been weirdly convinced that the world would end when they were thirteen. Kate had laughed about him then, but now she wished she had listened to him and appreciated her childhood while she could still afford to have one.

She wondered if the boy had survived, and if so, if he felt vindicated by the death of millions.

(What an odd coincidence, she thought, that he'd actually been right.)

Her father stirred when she closed the door. He was awake in seconds, a skill she had always admired. Kate was bone tired, but he looked worse. He'd probably not slept in all the days she hadn't seen him.

“Dad,” she greeted him. Her throat felt raw and painful because she had spend the entire day in medical holding back tears.

“Katie,” he said. “There you are.”

“Yeah. I was helping out some. It's not like you gave me a specific time.”

“I know. I'm sorry. Things are busy.”

“I understand.” For the first time in her life she really did.

“I heard you were helping in medical.”

Kate shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. “They seemed to need some help.”

“They do.” He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her closer. “I'm proud of you.”

Kate nodded wordlessly. The simple, familiar human contact seemed to break something inside her and suddenly she was too exhausted not to be heartbroken over the things she'd seen today, and would see tomorrow and maybe every day for the rest of her life. Her dad held her wordlessly and stroked her hair while she sobbed into his shoulder.

“Dad,” she finally said, hoarsely, after the tears stopped coming. “What's going on? Tell me the truth. Where is everyone? It's been months and we haven't heard anything. From _no one_.” She looked at him in the dim light, silently begging him not to lie to her, but also to say a truth she wanted to hear. “Please tell me we're not the only ones left.”

“We're not.” Dad's hand came to rest on her shoulder. He looked very serious. “There are others. We've had contact with other bunkers, other bases, all over the world. But, Katie...” He hesitated for a moment, then came to a decision. “The Unites States, as you knew them, are gone. There is no government anymore. Any attempt to restructure the military has been in vain due to there not being enough military left to fill the giant gaps in geographical distance. It's all scattered.”

Kate's eyes filled with tears again, even though she had suspected something like this. “So there's no help coming,” she asked. “Nowhere to go to? We're stuck here forever?”

“Not forever. We'll move out eventually, try to meet with other survivors and go from there. We will have to.”

“Because we're running out of food.”

“Among other things.” Dad looked at her full of regret, as if he hated the fact that she knew this more than he hated the circumstances.

“You send out teams to get more,” she pointed out. He seemed surprised that had this information, didn't reply at once. “They didn't come back,” she added.

“No, they didn't. We will send out more, soon. Better armed. They may have fallen victim to an ambush, or falling structures.”

“Or the ones who bombed us,” Kate pointed out.

Again her father hesitated in this way that made her feel like there were still horrors she could not fathom. “No, Katie. I don't think so.”

“You know who it was?” She was very awake all of a sudden. So far, there had been speculation, but no one ever admitted to knowing anything for certain. “Was it the Russians?” It was the only thing she could think of, even though the cold war had ended years ago.

“Yes,” Dad finally said. He sounded defeated. “The missiles were fired from Russia. But, no, they're not out there.”

“How can you know? If they want to take out _everyone_ -”

“They're gone, Kate.”

The word barely registered. It didn't make sense. “Gone? The Russians?”

“ _Russia_ is gone. The same way the States are gone. We... had contact with one of their bases, but it's been lost. There's only silence there. It's like here for them, or worse.”

 _'How can it be worse?'_ Kate wondered. “Who did that?”she finally asked. “Did we?” Wasn't this what everyone had always been afraid of? That one country would fire atomic missiles at the other and then the other would fire back in a last act of defiance, taking the enemy with them? Wasn't that what had kept the fragile balance for so long? How could the Russians have been so _stupid_?

Hot tears were in her eyes again, and she barely heard her father's voice when he told her, “We fired first.”

 

-

 

It took half an hour for Kate's father to explain, but explain he did. Something about a computer program that was put in charge of national defense and then went wrong. Attacked Russia, Russia fired back. But it wasn't just Russia that was attacked.

Something Dad had said earlier made its way to the surface of Kate's mind. “All over the world,” she repeated. “You said _all over the world_.”

Now, he didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

“But how? Why? _We_ did this?” Kate was beginning to sound hysterical. She _felt_ hysterical, like only hysteria could keep her from realizing the full impact of this information. Suddenly, the guilt was crushing. Kate was no idiot, she _knew_ that she had not given this order nor executed it and was as guilty as any thirteen-year-old in Russia, or Africa, or Japan. But she had spend days and nights hating whoever had done this to the world and it was _them_.

“The program. Some system called Skynet. It aced on its own. I think they tried to stop it. There's not a lot of intel on that. Most people who had anything to do with it are dead.”

“Did that computer kill them?”

“Defense system,” her dad corrected her. “I don't know. It seems likely.”

“Is it still around?” There was an enemy out there. An enemy that wanted them all gone for no reason. But surely it was all out of missiles now, was it? A computer program could fire missiles, but it couldn't build them.

Could it?

“It must be gone, destroyed in the attacks,” her father said, for the first time sounding soothing. Like he was saying something good among all this horrible crap. “There aren't many computers left, and even if its main frame still exists, there's nothing it can do anymore. It was created to control our defense network, and there's nothing left to control. And besides, you need to understand that it wasn't acting out of hatred or anything like that. It has no agenda to destroy us. It's just a computer program that malfunctioned, not a sentient being.”

“But it did destroy us,” Kate whispered. It did. Everything was gone, and she just couldn't take it in.

She'd always wanted to go to Italy. Years ago, her best friend from school had moved to France.

“We're still here, aren't we?” Dad spoke with gentleness and Kate cried harder because they were, but Mom and Charlie were not. (Charlie was five. He loved soccer even though no one else in the entire family was interested in the sport and no one knew where he had picked that up. It wasn't popular where they lived. It didn't make sense. But he wanted to be a professional when he grew up so Mom took him to training every week.) “There are still people around. We'll find each other and rebuilt. It's not over, Katie. The radiation levels on the surface aren't so bad. We'll leave soon, find others who need help and guidance in this mess. See what we can salvage. It's not the future I wanted for you but it's not over.”

“What about the rest of the world?” Kate asked, wanting hope but unable to imagine that anyone would stand a chance without Robert Brewster there to help them. Childish thoughts. She burrowed deeper into his arms.

“They seem to manage. There's a town in Argentina that seems to be way ahead of everyone. They organized their water supply, stocked up on food, burrowed in the earth to hide from the cold. And apparently stocked up on weapons and ammo, for whatever reason. Their leader seems to be a bit of a paranoid bastard who seems to think that something out there is still out to get them, but it keeps them organized, so I don't care. According to the military convoy that ended up in their camp, they are already swarming out, warning other survivors how to handle the situation. And to keep weapons ready to fend off evil killer robots...” he added as an afterthought, and Kate snorted almost against her will, making an effort to appreciate his attempt to cheer her up.

“It's true, really,” he assured her, but she heard the hint of amusement in his voice. “Killer robots. The guy must be a veteran who's seen one too many bombs drop, but, you know, as long as no one gets harmed I don't care if he's a bit of a nutcase. We've got our own people to take care about. It's getting even colder outside, we need to reorganize the space here and make room for about a hundred people camping on the surface of they will freeze. This'll require some organizing and a lot of work. Will you help?”

Kate nodded at once, glad to have been asked and that there was a useful task waiting for her that gave her an excuse not to spend so much time among the sick and the dying. She had been to the surface only once, very briefly, but even then the cold had hit her like a physical blow. It had been September, they were in Texas, and it had been snowing.

Dad had explained it would continue to be this cold until all the clouds caused by the bombings would clear away and that this could take years.

Was it this cold in Argentina? In Italy? In France? Was this the “global winter” everyone used to talk about like it was the boogeyman?

It didn't matter. What mattered was that they needed to save those people on the surface and keep them warm until they could start building shelters outside or reclaim buildings that were still intact. In the meantime, it would be very cramped.

Kate thought she could handle it. She had to. She stayed in her father's arms and they slept the rest of the night half-sitting on his narrow bed. It was the first restful sleep either of them had had in a long time, and it would be the last for ages.

 

-

 

Allowing the people who remained waiting outside their doors inside had been more of a struggle than Colonel Brewster had wanted his daughter to know. Objections had been raised; the additional people would drain their reserves and, more importantly, cause unrest among the civilians already inside, whose tempers were raw with hunger, desperation, and the lack of privacy and comfort. Fights would break out, the attempt to help those on the surface would do more harm than good, was the argument. In the end, a compromise was reached: The people were allowed inside, but only within the space between the heavy inner and the even heavier outer gate. Brewster was not convinced that this was a good solution and that it would work in the long run, but it was better than nothing and would protect those people from the worst of the cold.

He would try to move the children deeper into the bunker later. There weren't many anyway,

Kate helped where she could, clearing space, organizing blankets, re-writing the food schedule. Hunger had become a familiar friend to Robert Brewster as well, but so far no one was, in that sense, actively starving. But they needed more supplies. He worried about what had happened to the teams they send out, much more than he'd let on when talking to his daughter. They all did. A third team had been send out the day before, to find out what happened to the others after their communication broke off due to interference just a mile from the bunker. Getting food was only a secondary mission for them.

Scavengers may have robbed and murdered them after they found something desirable. Everyone still out there was probably armed in some way, and his soldiers may not have expected hostility in this environment when every life seemed so precious. It was one possible explanation, and it was a lot better than killer robots.

They would know more, soon.

Eventually, the gates were opened. The people outside had been informed and were ready. Brewster eyed the men, women and children inside the large hall, sitting on blankets and rags, with suspicion, but no one protested the new arrivals. They had caught glimpses of the situation outside every time those doors opened. They had seen helpless civilians freezing to death and for once they weren't aversed to sharing what little they had. Every now and again, people surprised him.

Kate was down there, handing out blankets, and when they ran out, families in the hall pulled closer together and handed over the blankets they could, just barely, do without. Robert Brewster had been certain things would go south if they tried to force these people to give up anything for the new additions – they would fight them, for sure, and he had been ready to get his daughter out of there at a moment's notice should the situation turn dangerous. Now he left with the hint of a smile on his face.

Other people were in charge of this matter. He was needed elsewhere, had only been there out of concern for Kate and for those civilians they were now responsible for. At the door of the command center he left all that behind of locked it away so it could not distract him: The fate of those people, worries for their future, and also his concern for his daughter and the grief over his wife and his little boy. (He still kept track of time. Tomorrow, he would have been married to Lilly for fifteen years.)

Inside reports awaited him. News from all over the world. Some from what had once been the United States. Other military bases, but not a lot of them. Most messages came from civilians with transmitting equipment who had survived by luck or because they were paranoid people with bunkers in their backyards. All military bases had been specifically targeted, and so had been navy ships on the ocean. These people they kept contact with – most of them were no help and no use and instead relying on the officers in this room to help them.

Colonel Brewster took it all in. Sorted it in his mind. What was important, what was not. What was, but could wait until later. What might offer a solution to one of their many problems.

Lieutenant General Svenson waved him over. The man looked like he hadn't slept in days, but Brewster knew he had: Two hours every day, on a cot in the corner of the control room, like clockwork. He'd had family in a city now gone. Robert imagined keeping inside this control room helped him to resist the urge to leave this bunker and start walking, yelling their names at the top of his lungs until he died.

The General did not yell anything. He was calm and collected and down to business. He, too, had left his family outside this room.

“The third team has reported back,” he said by way of greeting. “They came back into range ten minutes ago and will report asap.”

Those were, finally, good news, Brewster thought. He didn't think so anymore when one single soldier came in five minutes later, bleeding from a shoulder wound and talking about some sort of machine that had seemed to be patrolling the half-intact outskirts of the nearby town and fired at anything that moved with robotic precision. It had gotten half their squat, and then they other half had died in the explosion when a grenade finally took out the bulletproof thing.

“Not one of ours,” the soldier babbled at the end of his fantastic report, when something inside him finally fizzed out. “I don't know what that was. Not one of ours. It was alien. I don't know.”

He was led to medical and Svenson said that his report was useless because the man's mind had clearly snapped. Brewster thought that it was time to establish some line of communication with that nutcase in Argentina.


	2. 1998

It was early January when Colonel Brewster finally managed to get the guy in Argentina on the line, mostly because he no longer was in Argentina. When Brewster tried to contact him there he'd been informed that the man, Connor, had just left for Paraguay. Finding someone to contact in Paraguay had been impossible, but others in Argentina mentioned him coming through, giving some survival tips and cryptic warnings about killer robots and moving on. They all mentioned that he sounded nuts, but they were all in the process of relocating their camps underground. Apparently this Connor guy was suffering from a particularly convincing form of insanity.

No one else ever actually mentioned the sighting of killer robots, which was comforting in a way but made it harder for Brewster to justify his search for the guy to his superiors. He still send out messages to everyone they had contact with in South America to inform the base in Texas should Connor hit their camp.

And he made sure that the teams they send out for food and other supplies carried a lot of grenades.

No other team ever ran into one of the machines the young soldier, now dead from his injury, had described. They found the leftovers of the one destroyed, though, and the leftovers of their comrades. It sobered the mood among the military inside the bunker even more. The civilians never learned about it. Neither did Kate, who Robert saw less and less often, even in the rare moments he left the command center. She spend a lot of time among the civilians, administering first aid to those who were not hurt or ill enough to warrant one of the sparse places in medical. One of the medics had taken to training her, and from what he heard, she faced her challenges, even the ugly ones, bravely and with an instinctual understanding. Just thirteen years old and already on her way to becoming a doctor. It made Robert very proud in the moments it didn't break his heart.

In mid January, a few days after Charlie would have turned seven, word reached them from an abandoned military bunker in Peru, now occupied by civilian survivors, that Connor had just driven up to their door in a beat up truck full of weapons. Brewster waited impatiently until the man was pulled to the communication center and his voice came through for the first time.

“Connor here,” he said, the voice distorted by the bad line, sounding weirdly high under a lot of static.

“This is Colonel Brewster in El Paso, Texas,” Brewster introduced himself.

“Texas?” The distortions made it hard to identify emotions. “Man, I'm glad to finally talk to one of you guys in the US. I tried to get in touch with other army guys up there because you're going to be the ones screwed over first, but no one would listen.”

The choice of words was a surprise. Until that moment, Brewster had assumed that Connor was military, like himself, and a veteran of some sort. But he sounded definitely civilian; undisciplined and young. “Wouldn't listen to what? Stuff about killer robots?”

There was silence on the other end. Then the voice again, saying, “Oh shit. You've seen them, right? Shit.”

“We're not sure what we've seen, the only survivor didn't make a lot of sense. But something has been taking out our men, and that something seemed to be pretty immune to bullets.”

Again a brief silence filled with static. When the voice came back, it was the same voice, no doubt, but it sounded older, somehow. More mature. “Right,” it said. “They are. Listen to me. Here's what I know, and what you need to do.”

  


-

  


Four months later Connor made it to El Paso with a small convoy of men and women, both military and civilian, who had followed him from various bunkers and strongholds among the way. They arrived in a storm of fire and explosions the same day one of the machines the survivors in Texas had only very rarely spotted in the ruins finally made it to their bunker.

Colonel Brewster had not seen one before, and neither had many of the others. He had always warned his men to make sure nothing followed them back to their base, had declined all offers of civilians who wanted to help with the search for food and other things, and had always insisted on heavy firepower, but in the end the thing found them anyway, and its firepower was heavy indeed.

Not heavy enough to break through the gates that had held off a nuclear explosion, but if they let it get away, who knew what would come back? Brewster watched it with fascination, as it rolled towards their entrance on chain-wheels, then he gave the order to attack.

Explosions blasted all round it, and when the fire cleared away, the thing, bigger than expected and heavily armored, kept rolling towards them as if they had spit on it. It opened fire and the man beside Brewster died, the one inch steel plate he was covering behind doing nothing to protect him.

Three more fell before they managed to fire the rocket launcher at it. It didn't stop the thing, but at least it kept it from shooting for a moment.

And then it fired again, and Brewster imagined things like that in the ruins, taking out anyone who had the audacity to be still alive after the bombings, that kind of systematic, mechanical extinction that Connor had spoken of. And then the machine exploded in a rain of fire and bits of steel.

The convoy drove towards them through the wreckage, framed by flames, and Brewster thought later that this was the most effective entrance he'd ever seen anyone make in his entire life. If Connor showed up like this at every base he'd visited on his way, it wasn't surprising that so many decided to follow him.

Brewster, however, needed more than dramatic explosions to be impressed. He wanted to meet the man and see what he was really made of. The few times they had been in contact, Connor's advise had been invaluable, but the picture he had of him as a person was more than incomplete.

Now two figures jumped out of the car leading the convoy and Brewster stood a little straighter. He knew by now that Connor wasn't Army, but it never hurt to show respect to the guy who'd just saved your ass.

A tall man approached through the smoke, wearing a thick gray coat and a headband that kept long, dirty black hair more or less out of his face. His face was weathered but still young – mid twenties at best. It was the age Brewster had come to expect. The man was obviously of South American decent, though, and that was a surprise, if only because of the name.

He was flanked by a Caucasian, dark-haired boy who would have looked about Kate's age if not for the hard line around his mouth and the expression in his eyes that made him seem ancient. Maybe that was just what children looked out there, now, Brewster thought. Growing up fast was the only alternative to dying.

Connor stopped before the colonel, an unreadable expression on his face. But it was the boy who spoke first. “These things can be blown up with grenades, but you need to know their weak spot,” he said. “We ran into a few of them on the way. I don't think this place will be safe for much longer.” He looked Brewster up and down and then extended his hand. “Are you Colonel Brewster? It's great to finally meet you in person, man.”

Brewster needed a few seconds to swallow that.

  


-

  


It was April of 1998. Kate was two months away from turning fourteen and her dad was keeping secrets from her again. She knew it; saw it in the way he held his head when he told her things were picking up now they had some more supplies and that she shouldn't worry. She knew, but most of the time she was too tired to care.

She was making progress in her apprenticeship in medical. Two days ago she had assisted in a surgery. The surgery mostly consisted of cutting a woman's leg open, poking the mess inside, and then taking it off with a bone saw. She had managed not to throw up. Progress.

Earlier this morning, the soldiers looking for food had brought back a woman they'd found in the ruins of a still-smoldering building, badly burned and barely conscious. Doctor Becker, whom Kate considered her boss, had talked soothingly to his patient while he filled a syringe with air and pressed it into her veins. When Kate had asked him, appalled, why he hadn't helped her, he'd merely answered, “I did.”

It took some explanation from Melissa, a civilian nurse, for Kate to understand that the woman would have died, even with better medical supplies at their disposal. Kate understood, intellectually, but in her heart she still struggled to accept it.

The woman had been so badly burned, there was no hair left, and what clothes remained had been fused to her skin. There was no way of even telling her age. It was only by the color of her eyes that Kate had been certain there was no way this had been her mother.

The event left her reeling and she wanted to run and hide, give herself a few minutes to calm down at least, but there were still people to be taken care of and her absence would mean more work for everyone else, would mean someone might not get the help they needed in time, so she kept around and kept working, still reeling. Unpleasant, but useful. Her mom would have been fucking proud if she hadn't been fucking dead.

Things calmed down in the afternoon. (Kate knew it was afternoon because of the clock on the wall. She hadn't seen the sky in months and her sense of time was gone.) They did that sometimes, now, because there weren't really any more people coming in from the outside, grave injuries occurring inside the bunker were rare, and they had been able to contain a small outbreak of a virus with quarantine just in time in January. The people in medical now were mostly those who needed a long time to get better, and a few of those who needed a long time to die.

The time she wasn't needed there, Kate spend up in the hall with the civilian refugees, seeing to their needs and sometimes just providing distraction or a source of meager information. So she was right there behind the heavy gates when the sound of explosions started.

Had she known her father was right out there, she wouldn't have allowed that baby-faced soldier to usher her to safety.

At least, she thought later, sitting in her room and listening for the sounds of fighting to break out in the halls, she now knew for certain that the part of her able to feel fear wasn't dead after all.

Whatever had happened – and she very much wanted to know what had happened – it passed without breaking through the gates and leaving a blood bath on the top floor. It did, however, leave a bloodbath outside, and Kate was grateful that the first thing she heard upon entering medical was that her father was alive and unharmed.

There was a young solider whose arm had been shot off by something that tore through flesh, bone and muscle and turned them into bloody rags. With splinters. Did the same with his hip, where another shot had torn through his flesh and bones and other things. Kate couldn't guess how old he was. He looked like a boy.

Kate was witness to the discussion of the doctors. Given the proper care there was a chance he might live, they said, and while she could not imagine what kind of life that would be, here, she almost wept with joy. She'd seen enough death.

So this time, when Becker filled a syringe with air and ended the kid's life, she protested. Loudly.

“You could have saved him!” she accused the old, weary doctor, who, underneath the tired sadness, looked cold and detached to her. “You said so! Why didn't you save him?”

“I never said that,” he corrected her, calmly, while gently but firmly pushing her out of the room so not everyone would hear her voice. She hated him for it. She wanted everyone to know what he had done. “I said there was a chance that he would live. The chance wasn't high enough to risk it.”

“Not high enough,” Kate echoed. “To risk what?”

“That he would die.”

Kate didn't understand. She got that sometimes putting people out of their misery was all they could do, that there was kindness in sparing them useless suffering, but in this case, he might have lived. “You didn't give him a chance,” she pointed out, tears filling her eyes. “He might have made it. Maybe he wanted to fight.” Even without the arm and with all the pain he was in. Kate would have fought. She realized there and then, in a way she never had before, that she wanted to live.

“That's not good enough.” The doctor was still speaking patiently, but his eyes kept traveling back into the room where more tasks waited for him. “Imagine we would have helped him. We would have given him the medication he needed to stabilize him, to fight off infection, would have given him blood and oxygen – and then he would have died anyway. All those precious resources would have been wasted. We are very short on them, you know that. We have to make using them count.”

Kate stared at him, appalled and disgusted. To think that she used to look up to this man. “That's what it comes down to?”

“Yes, Katherine, that's exactly what it comes down to. Imagine there is another man, or a woman, or a child, who is hurt not as badly but bad enough that they'll die without medication. And we could save them, no problem, except we don't have the resources anymore, because we wasted them on this guy. The sad truth is that every time we use these drugs to save a life, we are sacrificing the life of someone who'll need it later, when we are out. So when we use them, we have to make sure it's not in vain. It's not pretty, but that's the world we live in now.”

Kate couldn't stop staring at him. All she heard was that he had sacrificed this kid, that he had decided who got a chance and who didn't. “You're a doctor,” she reminded him, her voice almost strangled out of her throat. “You made an oath to do no harm.”

“I did.” He refused to be impressed, or sorry. “These days, we have to decide _who_ _m_ we do no harm to.”

“You're a murderer.” The words were out before she could stop them, and before she even realized that this was what she had thought all the time. “You just killed him.”

Becker sighed. His eyes wandered into the room again, where someone was moaning loudly. Another victim, perhaps. “I understand you are upset. And probably tired. Take the rest of the day off.”

“And let you kill more helpless people?” Her voice rose again. He looked at her, wary and, finally, impatient. Annoyed. He was a murderer and her protest were an annoyance to him.

It hit her that he would never be held accountable for his crime. He could do whatever he wanted. There was no one to enforce justice. So much military around and no one would question it.

Because they would all agree. Kate saw this, from one moment to the next with perfect clarity, and it made her despair. She wanted to yell at Becker, but he'd already turned and left, and when she wanted to follow, Melissa, of all people, held her back and told her to go home.

Kate went. And she was determined never to come back again, and fuck duty and being useful and all those patients needing her, because she wanted nothing to do with people who sacrificed kids. Who decided that for some hypothetical greater good some helpless boy-solider who had risked his life to protect them all was never going to get a chance.

Bone tired as she was, sleep would not come. The rage and hurt and horror at what those people she'd admired could do kept her awake, and she held on to that rage because instinctively she knew that at the end of it was acceptance, and a line that, once crossed, would separate her from the girl she was now forever. The righteous rage was the last remainder of the child in her, unsuited for survival in this new world, and she gave it one last, long, passionate embrace before she let it go.

In the early hours of the morning, the shame over her behavior and over not being there to help outgrew the rage. The anger was still there, but she knew she would shove it down, and deal with it, in order to remain a part of medical and the work she did there. The need to go back grew stronger than the need to spit into Becker's face. Strangely enough, it was at this point that her mind finally found the peace required for exhaustion to win.

She slept deeply, fully dressed on top of her bed, and if she dreamed she didn't remember it. When she woke up she was cold and stiff and numb, but also a lot calmer than she had been in a long time. Going back to medical was something she didn't look forward to, but it was also something she knew she was going to do.

She took her time washing up properly for the first time in days. Combed her hair, selected a new pair of clean-ish but pragmatically worn-through clothes, and when she was just ready to leave, the door opened and her father came in.

She'd probably heard the commotion yesterday, he said. (Yes, she did, thanks for the fucking heads-up. Also, nice to see you're still breathing.) There was someone he wanted her to meet – some fifteen-year-old mini-general who had just arrived from South America and had a lot of interesting information about things in this world that Colonel Brewster wanted his daughter to be aware of.

Kate was confused. This was one of those moments where receiving some information about the things that went on would have been really convenient. At least there was an opportunity now, so she went with her father without protest and somehow she didn't speak about what had happened the day before and all the things that she was feeling.

Her father wasn't talkative either. He didn't even answer her questions about who this South American teenager was, exactly, or what had happened outside the day before and if it had anything to do with the ban on non-military people doing _anything_ other than sit around and wait. “We need some sort of information system,” she said after a while. “No one ever knows what the-” she stopped, thinking of Mom - “-heck is going on. Do you even grasp how nervous everyone is down there in your hole?”

Her father threw her one of those looks she hated. “Believe me, things would be worse if everyone knew. We're doing what's best, and you need to trust us.”

“Best for whom?” They were nearing the command center, the not-so-invisible line Kate had never been allowed to cross, and this was not a good time for this conversation, but then, she wasn't yelling and no one was nearby. “You're planning on protecting us clueless civilians from the ugly reality until everything gets better?” There was some acid in her voice, though. Maybe it would eat through something important. “You need to stop seeing us like that. It's not going to get any better, so start accepting that the f-reaking military isn't alone in this.”

“We'll discuss this later,” Dad said, and Kate wanted to yell after all. _When_ , exactly? In a week? A year?

“Sure,” she muttered. Then she added, “We're not cattle, you know?”

“Where does this comes from, all of a sudden?”

“How would you know it's all of a sudden? I haven't seen you in weeks.” But it sounded tired rather than angry. Kate was frustrated, but it was an old frustration, and she had all but run out of rage. Last night, when she'd wanted validation for her point of view, she had cursed her father for never being there even now, when she had no one else. Now, in the invisible morning, she was simply aware that she still had one parent and that made her luckier than the better part of mankind.

They had reached the command center. Two guards were standing before it instead of just the usual one, but they stepped aside when Colonel Brewster and his daughter neared the door. Kate had been behind it once, the very first day, clinging to her father and listening to the noise above ground, thinking about nothing but Mom and Charlie. The memories came back now, but she pushed them aside to concentrate on their mystery guest. It was another skill she had learned in medical.

The room behind the heavy double door was packed full with people. Lots of uniforms. Kate actually found it silly that the army guys were still holing on to these customs even now, but she supposed that there was comfort in the familiarity, that it helped them keep up discipline, and if the faint smell hanging in the air was anything to go by, many of them didn't have anything else. Hardly anyone had. Scavenging teams had gotten clothes from the ruins, but there was still not a lot to go around and washing was a problem, as the available water was needed for other purposes. The smell here was nothing compared to the hall were most of the civilian were crowded together, and positively pleasant compared to medical. Kate noticed it, but wasn't fazed by it anymore. If anything, there was comfort in the knowledge that these distant people who controlled their fate didn't have any more laundry than the rest of the population.

They were all hanging out in the center of the room, around some people sitting on the floor. Kate couldn't see them, but they had to be quite the commanding presence if they managed to make everyone so attentive while also looking down on them. Maybe they were just tired of standing. Kate recognized General Svenson as the one leaning against the cover of a controlling platform as if he also wished he could sit down, and realized by all the weight he had lost just how long it had been since she last saw him.

Then she made her way to the front of the Uniforms surrounding their guests and realized something else.

“ _Connor_?” she said, utterly incredulous, before the wild-haired kid on the floor had any chance to so much as blink in her direction. “ _John Motherfucking Connor_?”

And, yeah, there went her mother's influence. But this was just too much for her non-cursing policy to take.

  


-

  


So apparently John had something going on there, with all those big guys standing around him like he was the answer to all their problems (though some of them looked at him like he was their cause). Kate hoped that he was mostly done here because her entrance had certainly messed with the image he was presenting, and it certainly messed with his concentration. His eyes kept wandering to her, and he looked like he was seconds away from jumping her in a panic.

The general questioning of “You _know_ him?” had already passed. Kate had opened her mouth to tell them that they had been classmates for, like, five minutes a few years ago, but the shock on his face when she'd recognized him reminded her that he was supposed to be fifteen now, so she just said that he'd once ridden the same school bus, not quite knowing why she was supporting his obvious lie. Maybe she was just fed up with the military's secrecy.

She could still rattle him out later. For now she wanted to know why he was here and why everyone was so damn interested.

Apparently there was a discussion going on that had been going on for quite a while. Kate tried to follow with increasing confusion and worry until her dad, accepting that things had moved along while he'd picked her up, kindly filled her in that Connor had information on a new threat – that the computer program that had eliminated mankind was not done yet after all, but in fact coming after them with robots. Kate nearly walked out then, feeling at the same time like he was making fun of her and shocked to her core because this was a nightmare that didn't seem to end. Now they didn't just have to survive and get by, they had to survive something that was actively out to kill them.

It was terrifying. Kate wanted to believe Dad was pulling her leg despite knowing him better than that, because that would be merely insulting.

“Is that was happened outside yesterday?” she asked quietly, letting er voice sound drift towards sarcasm. “Killer robots?”

“Yes.” Dad nodded without taking his eyes off Connor, and Kate felt ha shiver run down her spine despite herself.

Kate looked at Connor, too. She couldn't seem to take her eyes off him, and her heart was racing. Because of what he was saying and the implications, because of the way he wa-s saying it – so completely earnest and not giving a single shit about whether anyone believed him in a way that left her no choice but to do just that. But also, she realized with some delay, because he was alive. He was someone from her past, someone who had existed, however fleetingly, in her world while her world still existed, and that turned him into a connection to everything that was lost, like a bridge to another world. The past was not all gone.

Some people she'd met, some things she loved were still there, out there, somewhere.

His words filled her with terror, but that was not what filled her eyes with tears.

What Connor spoke about were machines, built by the Skynet computer in automated factories, which were now roaming the streets of the destroyed cities, looking for survivors. There weren't many yet, but there would be, as they were gradually constructing themselves. They weren't wide spread yet, but they would be. Connor and his men had seen more and more of them the further they moved into the former States. Eventually they would be anywhere in the world. He said that like it was a fact.

The question was brought up, again and again, how he knew all this, how he had known to warn the camps he'd passed on the way here long before the first machines appeared. Obviously, this question was not a new one. Connor seemed annoyed by the barely-concealed accusation; irritated in a way that reminded Kate that he was not the adult he played, and not even the fifteen-year-old he pretended to be. “My mother and I knew someone who worked for Cyberdyne,” he said with the air of someone who had said it before. “They warned us. About Skynet, everything.”

“Yes, you said. And I told you, young man, that that's a load of horseshit.” That was a major speaking. Kate called him Major in her mind because she didn't know his name. Connor glared at him but didn't get to say anything before Major continued. “You evidently knew a lot about what is happening now, and knew it long before it happened. So you're telling me that you and mother knew about Skynet, about the machines, and did nothing. Until these things _killed billions_?” He didn't quite yell the last words but it was a close thing.

Everyone had lost someone.

“Why didn't you _listen_?” Connor barked back. “Did nothing? We were the only ones who ever did anything!”

“I sure don't remember receiving any warning from you.”

“Then you didn't pay attention. We tried, man. My mom did nothing but try for all my life and as a result they called her mad, tried to lock her up and wanted to take me from her. So you'll excuse us for taking off instead of letting them do just that.”

“That sounds pretty half-assed to me.”

“Yeah, half-assed was that you guys tried for ten years to snatch and lock up a single mother and failed, while said single mother tried to stop Cyberdyne all on her own. Where were you when she tried to stop the war? Because you sure as hell weren't helping! So sit the fuck down, shut up, and stop throwing accusations around without having had a long discussion with the mirror first.”

It was obvious that this was a sore subject. To Kate, it kind of came as a surprise that Connor didn't stand up as he spoke, because the voice and the words were more suited to standing and lifting the chin, and quite possibly bearing down on someone, although for that Connor would have had to climb onto something first. Somehow, he managed to project all that without getting his ass off the floor. The men left and right of him who clearly belonged to his entourage if their wild guerrilla-look was anything to go by, looked on without saying a word or even making much of a face, evidently confident that their leader could handle himself against all the brass in this room.

Because that was what he was, for all that the one closest to him in years had to be easily twice his age. Which still wasn't very old at all.

“Considering that none of us reacted in any way when we first heard about the machines, even though John tried to warn us, I don't think there's really anything we can say in our defense here,” Kate's father surprisingly stepped in, gaining a glare from Major and some others and something like reluctant gratitude from Connor, who looked him down and settled a little more comfortably onto his spot on the floor, satisfied that this discussion was over for the time being. “And considering that it's been a long night, I suggest we all get some rest while we can.” Kate's dad continued. It dawned to her that they hadn't rested yet since the attack last night. When Killer Robots had been attacking their base. Kate still didn't want to connect that thought with any kind of emotion, it was too absurd.

There was no protest from any side. It became clear as soon as Connor and his friends had left the room, however, that the part about getting rest had been meant for their visitors and not, in fact, for them all. Not one of the ranking officers in the control center seemed inclined to leave; instead, they started discussing among themselves, except for two or three who leaned wearily against the walls and listened but looked like they thought sleep would be a pretty good idea.

Kate spotted Sergeant Czynar, who had been in medical the day before with bad burns down the side of his body and a mild concussion from having been flung against a wall by an explosion. He was pale, his eyes bloodshot, and she walked over to him without hesitation or a conscious thought.

“I know you are a big, strong man,” she said. “But I'll have you know that our medical resources are limited, and the ones we used on you will not be available for someone else sometime in the future. That person is going to die, because we traded their life for yours. So if you keep running around until you drop dead that'll mean we let them die in vain, and believe me, that would make me very, very angry. You have no idea how much that would piss me off. So you leave here _right now_ , go to your room, and lie down, or I will personally knock you out right here. Trust me, the state you're in right now, I could.”

Czynar looked at her. Blinked. He seemed to sway a little, probably had trouble following her words. A woman with the insignia of a captain who stood nearby chuckled softly and took his arm.

“I know this is very exciting, but the lady is right,” she said with tired fondness in her voice. “Come on, Sergeant, I'll tuck you in.”

She led him away and Kate became aware that she had just send a Sergeant of the U.S. Army to his room.

When she turned around, her father was watching her, a strange look in his eyes. “You want to get out of here and talk?” he offered. “I know you must have a lot of questions.”

“I do,” she answered. Killer Robots. Aiming for the total annihilation of mankind. Most of all, John Connor. Who she now remembered had been in her class when they were about ten years old, and they never had anything to do with each other. It was quite possible that they had never spoken. She remembered him because he had been going on about how the world was going to end in '97 with the earnest conviction of a child that took ghost stories for face value. He'd been so earnest, in fact, that it had crept Kate out a little. She'd laughed at him along with the others because he'd managed to scare her. Now she was ashamed for that. Back then, she had been ashamed, too, but not enough to step out of that safe little cocoon of shared mirth and leave him alone.

He'd stopped coming to school halfway through the year and eventually she'd learned that it was because his mother had attempted to blow up some computer factory and was now on the run from the law, taking him along. It had been the talk of the school for days. Kidnapping, the teachers had called it, and Kate had always thought that was funny because he was _her_ kid.

Now, in the cool underground bunker in April '98, eight month into the end of the world, Katherine Brewster spared a thought for John Connor's mother, who had at least tried.

“I do have questions,” she repeated, her eyes going past her father to the door. “Mostly, why you didn't tell me before, as this clearly wasn't news to you. And how long you plan on keeping this from the general population. Am I right to assume that you will next warn me not to tell anyone about this, so they won't panic or something? Then what? You're going out there with all the fifty men you have left and destroy all the machines and the killer computer?”

Her father just looked at her. Then he shook his head, ever so slightly, and said very quietly, “You sound like your mother just now.”

The words hit Kate in a place she hadn't been aware could hurt anymore. But she fought down the sudden tears. “Well, Mom would want to know, too.”

“I know she would. And I'm sorry. I will tell you as much as I can, I promise.” But his eyes went sideways as he spoke as if making sure there was no one listening to their exchange and Kate became aware that as much as he wanted to tell her, he wouldn't go far beyond what he was _supposed_ to tell her.

Her father, the solider. It had driven her mom mad, too.

Well, maybe he would go a little beyond, hence the look. And it was tempting, so tempting – for information but also for the connection with him that she was desperately trying to hold on to. But before Kate could make up her mind whether she wanted to punish him by saying no, or wanted to go back to medical to get over yesterday and maybe stop on the way to check in on Czynar, or if she should just go to their room with him and talk, he was called by his superior.

“Hold on, I'll be back in a moment,” he promised as he walked off, and Kate sighed, shook her head in resignation, and left.

  


-

  


With the wounded from the fight with the machine (singular, Kate had come to understand – one single thing did all that damage), medical was still busy, but most of the day consisted of what they had come to call “house calls”: going through the masses of people above and check if anyone needed their help and was too shy, proud, or stupid to ask for it. A lot of the people were showing signs of sickness, but those were mostly caused by malnourishment, not enough water, and the chill that permeated the air. It could lead to an outbreak of something nasty again, but so far they weren't there yet.

All in all, the “masses” were about two hundred people, plus the fifty or so foot soldiers and collected brass below. With new supplies being brought in irregularly by scouts searching the ruins, they had enough food to keep that many people from starving. They didn't have enough to keep them well fed.

She didn't see Becker at all that day, so either he'd taken his own advice and gone to get some rest or he'd collapsed somewhere in a heap. Kate was fine with not seeing him. She had made her decision, knew her priorities, but being in medical where everyone had heard her outburst the day before still made her feel awkward and self-conscious. She hoped when Becker and her were to be in the same room again, enough time would have passed for her to pretend it never happened.

She was kind of surprised – and a little shocked – when Melissa, her patient friend and mentor, had to be the one to address it. She took Kate aside and asked her, kindly but solemnly, if she had gotten over herself. It felt like betrayal, but Kate swallowed her pride and the burning in her cheeks when she realized why Melissa was asking: Because what happened yesterday would happen again, over and over again. It hadn't been an isolated incident because things wouldn't get better.

“I have,” she therefore said, and it sounded like a promise. It didn't keep her from adding, “I still don't like it.”

And Melissa, the sweetest and most gentle woman Kate had ever met, patted her shoulder and said, “Save yourself a bullet for the day that you do.”

Kate took a break soon after that. There were no immediate emergencies and nothing that needed to be done and actually _could_ be done. She had a can of tuna and called it lunch, then wandered to her room, hoping against hope that her father would be there and that they could have that conversation he had promised, but really just aiming for an hour or two of sleep. She didn't find her father in her room, but she found Connor in her bed, and that was not a sight she ever wanted to walk in on again.

“What the hell?” she asked.

He startled awake, his messy hair sticking up in all directions as he blinked into the light falling in from the hallway. “Hey,” he slurred. “It's you. Is this your room? Brewster told me I could sleep here.”

Did he, now. “Brewster's my father,” Kate told him coolly. “That is my bed.”

Connor blinked again. Then he moved a little to the side as if in invitation.

“I'm not sharing my bed with you!” Kate hissed, scandalized. “Are you crazy?”

“You're living pretty sheltered here, huh?” He seemed a little more awake now, but not any less boyish. How people bought this teenage-leader thing was completely beyond her. “There's another bed right there.”

“That's my dad's.”

“And? You think he's gonna come in here and take it anytime soon?”

“He might.” It sounded lame even to Kate's own ears and Connor made no move to get out of her bed. So she closed the door and sat opposite him on Dad's bed. The dim, familiar red shine of the emergency lights made the room seem even smaller. “Well then,” Kate began. “Don't fucking go back to sleep now,” she interrupted herself when Connor flopped down again.

“Girl, I've had a really long fucking day,” he groaned from underneath her covers. And it hit Kate, right there and then, that he didn't have the faintest idea who she was.

Somehow, it hit her _hard_.

She should have seen that from the start, though. All Connor knew was that she knew him, and he knew that because she gave it away upon seeing him. After all, they'd never had anything to do with each other in school, probably never even exchanged words beyond her laughing at his crazy robot stories. Which didn't set her apart from all the others laughing at him. There was nothing, literally _nothing_ about her to stick in his mind.

 _'At least he doesn't remember me having been an asshole,'_ she thought, but there was no comfort in it. John Connor had created a connection between her and her old life, but if that connection was one-sided, what was that worth?

“Though,” she said, before she had any time to feel anything, and then she kept talking to cover up her emotions. And because this was an opportunity, all other things aside. “I have a lot of questions and if you want to sleep in my bed you can fucking answer them.” She stood and then flopped down on her own bed, half on top of him, leaving him to choice but to to pay attention. “First of all you can tell me why you go around telling people you're fifteen.”

“Because no one believed me when I said I was sixteen,” he grumbled, sitting up. Resigning himself to the terrible fate of conversation.

“No shit. You're twelve.”

“I'm thirteen.” That seemed to be a point of pride for him and Kate nearly snorted until she noticed the way he looked at her. All serious, as if the fact that he was thirteen instead of twelve was something of great magnitude.

She stared for a second and looked away the next. Weird guy. Weird, creepy guy. “Why is it so important they think you're older?”

“Who would follow a kid?”

“Why would they follow you anyway? Because you know about the killer robots?”

“That's why they _do_. What got their attention, anyway. But they _should_ because I know what I am doing.”

“You're _thirteen_.”

“So what?” He sounded a little annoyed, but mostly nonchalant. His eyes were blue, Kate suddenly noticed. Funny she would, in this light. Earlier they had looked darker to her. Maybe because his hair was dark and she was used to dark-haired people having dark eyes. That was what Mom and Charlie had looked like.

“No one at thirteen knows what they are doing.”

“I do. I have to. I was actually trained for this.”

“For what? Leading these people and fighting Killer Robots?”

“Yes.”

Again she wanted to laugh and couldn't because he sounded so completely serious. She wondered if he was maybe insane. There were people among the civilians upstairs who had snapped, ranted about the weirdest things, got the most dangerous ideas. But he didn't seem insane, just very convinced.

“Who trained you?” It wasn't hard to guess, actually. “Your mother?”

“Yeah. She knew about all this. Since before I was born. Tried to stop it from happening but trained me to make it in this world if she failed. And how to get everyone else to make it, too.” His eyes turned distant for a moment. “Or some of them, anyway.”

“You used to tell everyone the world was going to end in 1997,” Kate said quietly. Like a question.

“Oh.” He looked at her with those tired yet alert eyes, his gaze suddenly uncomfortably intense. “You're from that place. That was when we were still trying to make people believe us, but Mom told me to stop because it was getting me into trouble.”

Kate ignored the sting that came with the confirmation that he really didn't remember her, because the way he looked, at something far away, when he spoke of his Mom told her she was dead, and her heart went out to him. “What about your dad?”

He laughed, short and without humor. Somewhat weird, she thought. “He died in '84.” (Later she would think that he said that like one would say, “He died in Kansas.”)

“Were you even around in '84?”

He shook his head and Kate poked him. “So you _are_ twelve!”

“I was born in February, Smartass!”

“So you're just over twelve. What difference does it make? Everyone knows boys are late starters anyway.” She looked at him, daring him to raise to the bait, the engage in another battle in the age-old war between boys and girls with her, but he only scoffed and glared through his bangs.

“You've seen how that meeting earlier went down. Wanna hazard a guess what it was like in other places, where they hadn't even met the machines yet? Do you think they would keep dismissing me like that if I were a thirty-something army man with a record of heroism, instead of” - he gestured down his body like it was everything that was wrong with the world, “this?”

“I'd like to think that when you're thirty-something, no one will care about the machines anymore because they're all gone and this is long over.”

“It won't be.”

Again, this total conviction in John's voice even as he looked like he regretted speaking. Kate looked away from him, drawing her knees up to her chest. She shivered.

“How did she know? Your mom. About the end of the world. I buy the Cyberdyne story for the robots, but no one could have foreseen the bombs, or when they would fall, could they?” Surely if anyone could, someone in charge of something would have acted. Wouldn't they?

“No, I don't think so. Far as I know, they installed Skynet to take care of our national defense, and no one worried about it much, and then it became self-aware and decided that humanity was a threat that needed to be wiped out. Between the self-awareness and the decision, seconds passed, if that. When Mom tried to warn everyone, Skynet didn't even exist yet.” His eyes got that distant look again, but it was different this time, darker. “I wonder if anyone she tried to warn, in the military, saw that they called this new program Skynet and recognized the name, thought she might have been right. If they did, it never prompted them to _do_ anything. Or maybe they needed a name for the program and one of them said, 'Hey, let's call it Skynet, after the evil system that crazy lady was talking about. Wouldn't that be funny?'”

“That doesn't even make sense.”

“No? Time does seem to work like that, actually.” He snorted softly. ”I've spend a lot of time thinking about shit like that.”

  


-

  


“John?”

The girl – Kate, was it? - sounded vaguely concerned and John realized that he still hadn't answered her question. He sighed. He'd spend so much time being belittled and given funny looks for the stories he told, might as well add another occasion. On the other hand he had never spoken about these things as openly before, even though it happened in a manner she couldn't possible follow. It would suck to have that end in the usual flavor off disappointed disbelief.

But he had to say _something_ , and he was too tired to come up with yet another lie.

“What would you say if I told you a time traveler from the future told my mom about the war and the machines before I was even born?”

There, the words were said. Kate stared at him. She was really pale, John noticed, but he didn't think it had anything to do with his words. More with lack of sleep and sunlight.

“What? You're kidding?”

It was actually a question. John shook his head but also shrugged. “I don't expect you to believe me, but that's what happened.”

She was silent for a long time. Seemed to contemplate his words. “And you can prove that, I suppose?”

“Just with the stuff I know. I could prove it by giving you information about some events in the future, but it'll be years before those actually happen. As for here and now, no.”

“What did... Well, if I believed you, when did they come from? And why?”

John felt a tired grin twist the corners of his mouth. “Aah, because some time in the future we will defeat the machines and I will lead us to victory and Skynet will use a time machine to retroactively prevent that by killing my mom before I'm born, so I will send some solider after the killer cyborg to protect her. And he will tell her stuff.” Wow, that really sounded like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie. Maybe John should have practiced for this moment, but then, why bother?

“You know what? Show me this time traveler and I'll accept it as proof.”

Kate didn't look as incredulous as John had expected. Just a little. But also a little scared and a little intrigued.

“Too bad. He didn't make it.”

“Well, that's really inconvenient.”

“I know, right? No one ever stays alive to back up my outrageous claims.” John tried to speak lightly but the bitterness crept into his voice against his will.

“So the war will be won? When?”

Again, not the reaction John had expected. Absolutely not. He looked at Kate, for he first time really seeing her: His age, unwashed hair that shimmered red in the emergency lighting, cheeks hollowed by loo little food and a grim line around her mouth that looked out of place on her young face. Not a child. But not an adult either, if the wide, bright eyes that demanded answers rather than denying them were anything to go by.

And he had the chance to tell her the truth once again. Say that the machines would be defeated in 2029. But it was such a long time until then and he didn't want her to lose hope when she was the only one knowing what was happening who might have any right now. He also didn't want to fill her with too many expectations. This was hard. In the end he said, “I don't know. But it'll be years. Many years. I'll be all grown up by then and won't have to lie about my age anymore.” He grinned weakly and to his relief she actually tried to return the smile.

“So that time traveler told your mom about the machines and all but not what year he was from?”

“Well, there wasn't much time before he died, you know? Maybe he was planning that for later.”

“Was it you?”

John froze, taken aback. “What?”

“That time traveler. Was that you, going back to save your mom?”

“Oh.” He contemplated that question for a moment. “So you believe me?”

“I don't know. But the world did end in 1997, and I've seen soldiers who've been shot to pieces by killer machines yesterday,” - her face twisted for a moment and he remembered the first time he had seen it first hand - “so right now I'm willing to believe just about anything.”

That seemed sensible enough. John nodded. “No,” he said. “It wasn't me. Won't be me.” His mom used to struggle with the tenses, too.

“Are you sure? Your mother might have lied to you about it because she didn't want you to know how you're going to die.”

“No.” The mere idea that it could have been him made John shudder in the face of the things that he knew about that time traveler and she didn't. The image it conjured in his mind was pretty gross, and not because of the dying thing. Although he wasn't keen on that, either.

On the other hand, the thought of dying to ensure his own existence wasn't nearly as bad as having someone else do it for him.

“It wasn't me, trust me,” he continued, already knowing that he wouldn't tell her how he knew that. Not her, not anyone. And definitely not the one person who would deserve to know. He hated thinking about this. “I've seen pictures. Mug shots – he got himself arrested before they managed to take out the terminator and, you know, he bit it. That definitely wasn't me.”

It was even true. John had hacked into the police database some time after his mom had taught him how to do something like that, and if he was really lucky, she'd never found out about it. (Looking back, she probably had. She had been even more quiet than usual that day and the next, clearly troubled by something, and when John had woken up in the night and opened his eyes without making a sound in their tiny, busted-up trailer, he'd seen her sitting with a book in her lap, staring at nothing with tears running down her face and that look in her eyes that always made him want to break something. The mug shots had not been the only photos he'd found in that police file.)

Kate stared in fascination. “What was his name?”

“I don't know,” John said again, another lie. She raised her eyebrows.

“Seriously? You said he got arrested.”

“He didn't have any papers on him, did he? I mean, he was from the future, not even born yet, so they had no way of identifying him. And Mom never told me his name, because she didn't want me to be conflicted when I actually met him, or something.” Not the truth, but sometimes he wished it was. Growing up there had been no one he'd wanted to meet more badly than Kyle Reese, but there was no meeting he dreaded more, too. Now, perhaps, more than ever, because now it was something definite that would happen.

“But you've seen photos.”

“Well, he wasn't at his best in them, and also much cleaner than anyone I've seen in months. When I meet him in real life, he'll be conveniently covered in dirt and I might not even recognize him.”

“So how will you know who to send?”

“He'll volunteer.”

Kate settled deeper into the nest of covers that John had been trying to sleep under and he knew that she expected the whole story now. And with her actually sort of believing him, how could he not give it?

So he told her the story of the terminator who was send back in time to kill his mother and of the soldier who was sent back to protect her. He told her about the hunter killers Reese had told Mom about, about how the 600-series terminators had rubber skin, about how dogs were used to pick out the later models. He told her about how his mom had been so scared when all the Sarah Connors in the city got murdered, how she thought her protector had been the murderer out to kill her, about how she accepted the truth, and the massacre at the police station, about how seemingly unstoppable the terminator had been. How he made it through being shot at, blown up, set on fired, blown up again, and finally found his end in a hydraulic press at the hand of a Sarah Connor who had, at some point in those less than two days figured out that she could take care of herself. And how by that point she had to,

He left out a lot. All the parts that he knew best because his mother had treasured them in her memory and her heart and shared them with John not because he needed to know but because he was the only other person in the world they would matter to. (Even then, John had often wished that she had spared him this burden.)

“She had me some time after that and immediately dropped off the grid,” he concluded his story. “Didn't want to risk another killer cyborg to find her by way of phone book, though she didn't really think they could send another one. For all I know they won't. I guess she got a little paranoid after that first one.” He shrugged, making it sound speculative, when in fact 'a little paranoid' hadn't begun to cover it. “There was also the thing where she hung out with a lot of outlaws to learn from them, and have me learn from them, and that thing where she would constantly try to find a way to prevent Skynet. That time I went to school with you what pretty much the only time I ever had something resembling a normal environment, though of course growing up I didn't know that. I think Mom decided to take that risk so I could have a chance to be an average kid for fifteen minutes.” Or because it took them close to Cyberdyne and his mother needed a while to get the lay of the land. John never doubted his mom had loved him dearly, but she'd been nothing if not pragmatic, and he hadn't enjoyed his stint as a normal school kid anyway. He hadn't fit in, hadn't shared the same stories and experiences as his classmates, and everyone laughed at him for telling the truth.

“She's dead, isn't she?” Kate asked.

John nodded silently. Eventually he explained, “Killed in the bombings. She could have gotten to safety, but she saved me instead. Guess I was just more important.” The last line was full of bitterness and also unfair. John just so hated this preset destiny that made his life so important at the expense of everyone else.

“Or maybe she was your mom and didn't want you to die because she loved you,” Kate suggested what John already knew to be, at least partially, true.

He looked away for a second. “You ask me, the world would be better off with her in my position. All I know, I learned from her, but she was so much...” He searched for the right word. “... _more_ than me. Tougher, stronger, more experienced. She didn't get to teach me all the kills I need to do this, Kate. We'd have needed more time.” To his utter amazement, his eyes filled with tears. He blinked them away mercilessly before they could fall, but his voice still rang with strangled emotions.

“My mom died, too,” Kate told him. Her voice was calm. “Along with my little brother. I got to visit Dad at his base, we were close to the bunker. Mom took Charlie shopping. We never saw it coming. I thought for a while that they might have made it, hidden away somewhere like us but...” Finally, her voice began to tremble. “There's nothing left of the city center. Nothing.”

John had seen his mother die. He hadn't thought that anything could be worse. But to think of not knowing for sure, of not having any proof... “I'm sorry,” he said quietly and meant it.

But Kate shook her head. “Everyone's lost family. Most of them all of it. I'm luckier than you. I mean, after all, I still got my dad.”

There was no humor in the short bark of laughter that bust from John's throat. “Yeah,” he said, and nothing more.

  


-

  


John and his companions stayed at the bunker for three days before they decided to move on. It came as a bit of a shock to Kate, who had somehow assumed that they were going to stick around. All those things that John had told her, about his mother and time travel – would he tell that to just any passing acquaintance he would never meet again? Because if he left here, chances were this was the last she'd ever seen of him. Travel across states wasn't exactly something one did for fun anymore.

She'd asked him why he needed to go when this here was a military bunker with as many trained soldiers and tactical supplies as he would find anywhere these days. John had replied that he needed to get to Los Angeles eventually. That was where Skynet was vulnerable. That was where they would win in the end.

He placed a lot of trust in that unknown soldier's prophecies.

“It'll take you months to get there,” she'd pointed out.

John had seemed unfazed. “Years, I suppose. There are other bases I need to stop at. And I need an army. And... well. Things are going to happen that I need to deal with. Just make sure these guys here keep their promise and pass all my info about the machines and their weak spots on to the other bases. And relocate this camp as soon as you can. Spread out more. The machines know where you are now, and they will come back with more firepower. If they can't get through these doors, they will just wait outside until you have all starved.”

Kate had shivered then, understanding that she was no more safe here that he would be on the road.

From there, it hadn't taken long for a decision to be reached.

“We should go with them,” she told her father the day before John and the others were to leave. “We're just sitting ducks here, and they at least know what to do.”

“We?” Dad ran a hand through his hair. “Who's we, Katie? All of us? We can't take that many people on a track through that wasteland and keep them alive. And we can't leave them behind. Much as I'd like to go, I don't see how we could.”

“You'd like to go?” That came as a surprise. Kate hadn't thought he would want to leave with the teenager who seemed quite comfortable as the one giving the orders and sure as hell wouldn't take any.

“Yes. Because you're right, this place isn't going to be safe much longer. And even if we manage to spread out underground and hide, as Connor suggested, we're still just sitting here. Surviving, perhaps, but not doing anything. I want to fight those machines, destroy Skynet, and that's not going to happen here.”

Kate loved her father dearly, always had, but they rarely truly understood each other. In this, they did. What Kate wanted, more than to be safe, more than to stick with John, was not to be useless. They _could_ do something. In this world, that meant they _had to_.

“What if only we go?” she offered. “Svenson can look after the people here. He doesn't believe in John anyway.” She wasn't yet willing to say she'd go on her own. Not only because she didn't think her father would allow it but also because she was aware that if she left him now it would mean she would never see him again. She wasn't ready to take that step.

At the same time, she feared that this was her one and only chance to join the resistance and actively fight against the machines and the thought of missing it filled her with despair almost as strong.

“I have a responsibility here, Kate. I can't abandon this base.”

“You have a responsibility _everywhere_! What says you have to take care of these people here and abandon everyone else?”

“Chance,” he replied, and that was it.

The next day, however, as John Connor and his entourage were on the way to the massive doors keeping the cold and the malevolent robots out and Kate watched them while fighting the urge to drop everything and just follow, John stopped near the exit, climbed onto a stack of boxes, and addressed the dirty and malnourished people who were sitting, standing, cleaning, chatting, and just generally trying to live in this hall. He told them about the danger of the robots, about Skynet and why the world had had to end. All the things the army didn't want them to know in order to keep them calm. Someone, somewhere, protested and told him to shut up but nothing happened after that. John didn't have to raise his voice much; everyone fell silent around him. There was a presence, a strength to him that seemed to fill the room and made everyone listen, and understand. When he was done with his explanation, he made his offer.

And that was what it was: Not a request to come fight with him. He didn't ask people to give up this precarious safety and risk their lives in a seemingly hopeless fight. He offered them the opportunity to determine their own destiny and give mankind a fighting chance.

And over and over, it felt to Kate like he was looking at her, directly. Speaking to her directly, wanting her to come along. When he asked his question in the end, her hand rose before she knew what she was doing, but she knew that what she was doing was right.

She was surprised, actually, that there were people whose hands stayed down.

In the end, about fifty of them men and women, boys and girls from this hall decided to join, some soldiers among them. Kate already wondered how they were going to get north. There were no cars or other transports for this many people.

She found the answer to that question herself before she had to ask. There were cars, all around. Many of them still working, They just had to find them, get them. Get gas. A first challenge for this group. Maybe it was even for the best.

John broke into a grin when she walked up to him among the people gathering near the doors. He looked honestly delighted to see her. “I'm really glad you're coming,” he greeted her. Then his eyes fixed on something behind her. “And you, Sir.”

“What can I say?” Kate barely heard her father's voice through the surge of joy that cut through the mix of exhilaration and unease that filled her. “I may be a solider, but I'm a father first, and I won't leave my girl alone out there. Besides, I won't miss the chance to get these things off my planet.”

Kate couldn't see anything because she was hugging her father and had her face buried in his shoulder, but she could hear John laugh. “How long have you wanted to say that?”

“Actually, I never hoped to be in a situation where I had to, but now that the situation's here, would've been a shame to waste the opportunity.”

Kate had to laugh, too. It wasn't even funny as much as it was absurd to have this conversation here, now. Behind her a ragtag gang of as of yet mostly unarmed fighters in an extermination war against Killerbots, and as she pulled away she caught a glimpse of the hall, and the faces of those who wouldn't come, silently looking on. Some of them so young (Two babies had been born here since August. One of them still lived.), all of them afraid, and most hopeless. She saw the gaps in the group, torn by Connor now, but also before by disease, injury, and suicide. Kate looked at them and suddenly knew with crushing certainty that they wouldn't make it.

She couldn't tell, however, if it was the people staying behind she didn't give a chance that moment, or everyone in this room, or the whole human race.

Then her eyes found Melissa in the back of the room and everything else was forgotten. She thought about Becker, the patients in medical, the responsibility she had only just accepted, and didn't know what she could say to make this right.

But Melissa met her gaze with the hint of a smile on her soft face that seemed to have been made to show kindness and nothing else. She had been so patient with Kate, and all the sick and the dying, and the ones suffering loudly or in silence, and the ranting and angry, and now she looked at Kate across the room and placed a hand over her heart and Kate knew she had been given her blessing.

It made her tear up. It also made it easier to turn around and leave when the time came.

 


	3. 2004

The sun was setting somewhere behind the clouds, turning the world even darker. And colder. The men and women of the small group walking through the wasteland of Topeka pulled their scarves tighter around their heads and moved on. They should find shelter soon, somewhere to spend the night, but this area was no good.

The man walking in front of the six others sighed. He wasn't familiar with this terrain and had made the wrong decision coming this way. One of the bombs must have hit exactly this place, or very close by. There just was not enough left of any buildings to offer a roof and at least three walls. One was the best they'd get here. Maybe one and a half. There was no choice but to move on until they made it to the other side, where the grim outlines of ruined skyscrapers were barely visible against the darkening horizon and stubbornly refused to come any fucking closer.

He didn't even have proof that this really was Topeka. They hadn't come here over a street that still had road signs. He just thought it was because according to their combined geographical knowledge it should be.

The one advantage this desolate place had was that they were all alone. Nothing was left here so no one with any sense and local knowledge would come this way. There was nothing for the machines to search for, so they concentrated their efforts elsewhere.

Shelter for the night would have been welcome because of the cold, and because they were all tired, but if they didn't find a good place, their leader would have them keep walking. Movement was the best weapon they had against the ice creeping into their bones and if anything, moving around in the dark was safer than moving at day. The man they followed had long since considered changing their rhythm to nocturnal, and the main reason why he hadn't was because the machines might not be able to see as well in the dark, but neither did they. Even if they had lights, using them would have just been an invitation to be shot. So they stuck with the day, crossing more dangerous areas in the twilight of dusk and dawn.

Stuck with day. The man almost laughed. Calling the state of semi-brightness that happened every few hours “day” seemed like a joke on the better days. Since the bombs fell seven years ago, no one had seen the sky. No one he had met anyway, and he couldn't imagine anymore that it was different anywhere else in the world. Even places the bombs hadn't touched suffered the aftereffects. In fact, he was certain that the cold and the corresponding lack of food had killed more people than the initial attack had. That, and the lack of light, the bleak of one dark day following the next without relenting. Sometimes he thought that the hopeless depression had taken more men and women than the grief and fear.

It seemed now that there was hardy anyone left.

But there were seven here, wrapped in layers of dirty clothes and carrying guns and rifles in the crook of their arms. The Magnificent Seven they liked to call themselves, trying to make light of the fact that once, they had been ten.

Jessica walked up to her leader, pulling the scarf off her face a little so she could talk. “Doesn't look like anything's still standing around here, Jus,” she observed. “We sleep in the open?”

Justin shook his head. “Lovely night for a walk, don't you think? I say we make it to the edge of civilization, find shelter then. Any luck, we should easily make it before daybreak. Once we found a nice ruin, we can all outsleep the machines and move on at dusk. Anyone protesting?” He turned to the rest of the group and one figure, broader than the others with a foundation of muscle created in the Time Of Gyms, raised a hand.

“My feet are protesting, Colonel,” Hank passed on. Someone snickered.

“Let me rephrase that: Anyone have a better idea?”

No one did. Not even Hank's feet.

So they walked. The ground had been blasted clean here, which at least made walking easy. There were areas where the rubble didn't let anyone pass without serious climbing, and others, more disturbing ones that were covered in human remains stripped bare to the bone by time and unforgiving, unnatural fire. The most disturbing thing about them was that after a while, Justin had stopped wondering who those people had been, what they had been doing at the moment the shockwave hit them, and instead started to accept them simply as a part of the landscape.

They had come through areas, on their long way here, where the cold had preserved the remains of people who had not been burned beyond recognition. People who still looked like people. Whose open, frozen eyes seemed to follow them. Some of whom held hands.

They made it across the plain and to the edge just after midnight; way sooner than Justin had thought they would. A lot of the smaller, burned shells of buildings had been plain invisible in the twilight even when there had still been twilight to be had.

Not that these were much good. It was only marginally warmer inside; the only thing they protected from was the weak wind and being too visible. Justin led his brave men and women further away from ground zero and towards the ruins of bigger buildings. Going underground would have been perfect for the day of rest he had planned, but going off the ground and deep into a sturdy box of rooms and walls would do it, too.

Where crossing ground zero didn't take as long as Justin had thought it would, making their way through the Edge took longer than anticipated. Not only was it harder to navigate in the darkness, with them running into dead ends and having to backtrack, they also had to be cautious here, in case machines were nearby. Not likely, as this area was pretty deserted, but some survivors had picked up on the fact that the machines stayed away from places that had nothing to offer to humans and sought shelter there, and the machines had picked up on that. Here, however, nothing moved but them.

Still, one could never be too cautious. Three of them had paid with their lives for the rest to learn that lesson.

They turned into the first Hotel Nuclear Rubble they could find; a five storey building with blown out windows and blackened walls. The top floor was partially collapsed but the lower ones were sturdy enough. The fourth floor had been designed for large offices and was useless to them as it was far too open. But there were private apartments on the third floor. After a brief search they found one with a large kitchen without windows where they all could huddle and rest.

It was nice to be out of the cold, but it wasn't exactly cozy in here either. They were used to worse, though. Justin gave the room at least a three and a half star rating – would've been five if the adjoining restroom would have offered a working toilet, but that _never_ happened.

Naya and Aaron lay down immediately, half on top of each other in a corner. They were exhausted, their feet hurt, even though they didn't communicate it was much as Hank's did. Justin knew because in a show of solidarity, they seemed to have passed on a share of that hurt to his own feet.

Hank lit a cigarette on their lone candle, smoking with his eyes closed. When he was almost done he offered the remains to Justin, who accepted gratefully. The cigarette was good for another three or four drags and would last him a day or two.

Once he'd passed it on, Hank left the room to sit outside the door with his rifle in his lap, watching the area outside the window. He would alert them the moment anything they didn't want near them came too close for comfort.

While Justin enjoyed the rare pleasure of nicotine, Jessica started roaming through the cabinets in the kitchen for anything edible or otherwise of use. There was nothing. None of them had expected there to be – this place was picked clean, the only thing left a blackened heap in the back of one closet that might have been food once, but certainly wasn't now. They had known there would be nothing here for them before they even entered the building but they still had to check. It was part of their routine.

Mildred and Andrew ate before they went to sleep, Naya and Aaron would do so after they woke up. Everyone got the same amount of food per day – when they took them was their decision.

There was still freedom in this world, after all.

Justin liked to draw his meal out over the entire day: one bite here, one there. They hadn't had a lot lately because this city didn't offer much by the way of leftovers, but this also wasn't the worst they had been through yet.

Jessica crouched beside him where he leaned against the wall and his backpack, wishing his ass weren't so cold but too lazy to drag out his blanket. “You sure this is Topeka?” she asked. “I didn't see no sign.”

It wouldn't have to be a road sign. A storefront reading “Topeka's No.1 Supermarket” would have done it, but the place didn't have much left by way of storefronts either. “Pretty sure. I can still read a map. Unless the tectonic plates shifted since the last one was drawn, this is where we wanna be.”

Jessie pulled a face. “What plates now?” she asked in a tone that told him she didn't actually want an answer to that question. Justin knew she hated it when they used words that required any kind of education whatsoever because she'd never gotten any. At eleven, Jessie was now the youngest member of their group, and seven of those eleven years had been spend in this world. She had never gone to school. Someone had taught her how to read – some, anyway – before they'd met so she could identify cans by their labels, but she'd never touched a textbook or received a history lesson. She wasn't fully a child of this world, as she still remembered ice cream and playgrounds (although that memory was fading) but she was close enough.

Which, ironically, meant that as their youngest, she was also the one best suited for the conditions of these times. Justin, Hank, Mildred – a part of them still longed for the comforts of the past and complained about aching feet.

Not that Jessie never complained about that. It was just that she had less of a sense that things could be different. Her and the twins – Naya and Aaron, who were neither twins nor actually related. Just a few years older than Jessica, the three of them sometimes made Justin feel like he was commanding an army of child soldiers. It was an altogether uncomfortable notion.

“What I'm saying is that this is Topeka,” he explained without medium sized words. “I have no worries about the city, more like where in this city we have to go.”

“We'll find someone to ask,” Jessie promised, stood, and walked over to the other kids to lie on top of them without any show of self-consciousness. Naya half-rose from sleep to wrap her arm around the younger girl and settled back into oblivion. Sharing body heat like that came naturally to them. After seven years, it came naturally to Justin, too.

Mildred shuffled over to the candle. She took out a brass cup, poured some powder into it, filled it with water from her flask and stirred it with the old spoon she always carried in her pocket or between her teeth. Then she held the cup over the flame, closing her eyes. Justin shook his head with a smile. He'd used to laugh about that and pointed out about a hundred times that she wouldn't get her coffee even halfway hot like that, but she had patience, and it kept her fingers warm. By now, after almost a year, he knew that sitting like that was a form of meditation for her – something that got her more rest and peace than any attempt at sleep.

Also, there was lukewarm coffee at the end of it.

Justin snorted softly and leaned back, only opening his eyes once more when Andrew walked past him to settle down at the other side of the kitchen table. Before he sank down he winked at Justin as an invitation for another kind of sharing body heat they both knew wasn't serious in this place and Justin playfully kissed this air in his direction and then flipped him off. Andrew dutifully disappeared from view and Justin closed his eyes again.

He drifted for a while. A sound on the other side of the kitchen door eventually startled him awake but it was just Hank, sneezing. At the table, Mildred had also opened her eyes. Judging by the way the candle had burned down, they had been out for a good hour or two.

A silent signal passed between Justin and Mildred and they both got up at the same time. Justin walked over to where Andrew was dozing – real sleep was a rare luxury these days – while Mildred took a sip from her precious coffee and then took it outside to relief Hank of his watch.

When Hank came in, he left the door open a bit, admitting pale sunlight, and blew out the candle. Justin heard him move to the other side of the room, then a muffled “Scoot over” as he moved the kids to his convenience and then lay at the edge of the pile to provide them with all the warmth his larger body could offer through several layers of clothing. Justin didn't need to see any of that. He'd seen it a hundred times before.

Justin himself settled beside Andrew and closed his eyes, allowing himself to sink into a light slumber. He didn't have an alarm that would tell him when it was time to take his watch, but there was no need for it: He would wake up about a dozen times in the next few hours and at some point he would decide that he was rested enough.

The building was far off from anything useful, and he was surrounded by several people he trusted, one of whom was keeping watch. Altogether it wasn't that bad. This was as close to safe as Justin had felt in about two years. Then again, they had felt safe in Arkansas, too...

In the end, his sleep was so light that he couldn't even tell when he was awake and when he wasn't. By the time he decided he'd had enough he still felt like pressed out shit, but that was the normal state for all of them. He made a mental check list: Could he walk? - Yes. Could he fight? - Yes. Was he hungry? -Hell yes! He decided to go outside and have his lunch while on watch.

Mildred was sitting closer to a blasted-out window, but still far enough inside that she couldn't be seen from the street. The street was not where her attention was, anyway. She was watching the sky.

“Aerial HK,” she said in her thick accent. “Showed up about an hour ago.”

Justin followed her line of sight and eventually saw it: a dark shape hovering just above the ruins in the west, very far away. Whatever it was looking for, it wasn't them.

They watched it together for a while, then Mildred wordlessly turned around and went to settle with the others. Like her, Justin decided against alerting them to the machine's presence. It was too far away to be a concern at this point, but he still watched it carefully while he had breakfast/lunch/dinner, in case it decided to widen the parameter of its search.

Dinner today was two stripes of dried jerky and one small can of pickles. Justin had half a stripe for starters and stuffed the rest away for later. The worst of the hunger was gone, and stopping after a few bites had become habit so it wasn't that hard anymore, but damn if he didn't wish he could have more.

Most of the others took all their food at once, so they would feel halfway not-hungry at least once a day.

If they didn't find provisions soon, they would have to shorten the rations even more. Justin sincerely hoped that he hadn't brought his brave soldiers all the way here just so they could starve under a different sky.

If Justin were to stay in this place long term, and if he knew it better than he did, he would have built little hiding places for provisions for any of his men, women and kids who had to be out here. He would also built a lot of bunkers where they could rest in safety, and he would built them further and further into the parts of the city that still had to offer something. So they could find what they needed and then find safety without having to cross enemy territory in one long trek again. Because his main base, where everyone else was waiting, would be in the outskirts, where the machines weren't looking for survivors because the survivors had nothing to survive on.

Or in the center, where the blast had left nothing. But, no. The center was clear, but it was surrounded by enemy forces. Which made it a fucking horrible location.

So if he were a base hidden in the ruins of Topeka, he would be somewhere to the north of that hunter killer flying around over what may have been a communal center once. Shopping malls and stuff. Depending on how good a job the machines had done patrolling the area, there might be something left there for them, even after seven years. Of course, if the machines were doing a good job, trying to get it might just get them killed.

But then, so would starvation.

Justin sighed and let his eyes travel to the east for a moment, where far, far away chimneys were emitting black smoke into the layers of dust and ash that were their sky. If he were a factory for the creation of even more machines, that was where he would be, and if he were a man who had a lot of explosives, that was where he would take them. But, alas, he wasn't. And their handguns and machine pistols wouldn't get them very far on that particular mission.

They needed to do better. But that was, after all, the plan.

“Soon, baby,” Justin muttered and turned his attention back to the hunter killer in the sky.

  


-

  


“We're heading west,” Justin told them the just before dusk, when they spilled out of the building and back into the cold air that smelled of ashes too much to be called crisp.

Hank pulled a face. “That's where that HK is.”

“That's what we came here to fight, didn't we?”

“Far as I remember, Colonel, we intended to get backup first. And explosives.”

“That's the general idea, yeah,” Justin muttered distractedly, staring west. From were he was he couldn't see the HK anymore, but he knew it was still there. All day it had barely ever moved, except one slow circle over a very localized area. Whatever it was looking for had to be there.

Besides all other reasons, that meant there were people over there, trapped by the threat above their heads. And if Justin and his friends were lucky, they were even useful people.

If they were really lucky, the HK would fuck off the moment it became too dark to see with conventional means, because from all Justin had seen so far, their infrared was kind of crap. Might want to conserve fuel. Thank you, computer brain, for thinking in terms of one-line effectiveness.

They started their track, keeping their eyes open and their steps quiet. Every now and again five of them waited behind a crumbled wall or under a half-burned roof while two scurried away in different directions to check if there was danger nearby. It was slow-going and soon they were once again walking through darkness, but it was better than being careless and dead.

Snow was lying on the ground, and that helped, as it improved the visibility in the dark just that much. But it also made their footsteps crunch where the snow was frozen. As always, nothing good came without a whole bunch of bad.

The streets were wide here, and the remains of the houses too close to each other to allow for cover. Justin didn't like it. He decided to take a detour, all the time keeping his eye on the sky for the aerial HK, but not seeing it anymore. He was almost willing to believe it had given up when he heard gunfire.

Either the HK had found its prey or whoever it had had trapped had grown tired of waiting. The familiar, friendly sound of machine guns mingled with the just as familiar, deeper sound of the more powerful guns the machines used and the sound of splintering stone.

It was still a good distance away. Justin gestured for the others to move that way and was soon overtaken by Mildred, her tick black braid bobbing on her back as she nimbly moved over, under, and around the ruins. To his left he say Naya disappear through a passage that was too narrow for anyone but Jessie to follow her and knew the two girls whose combined age was less than his would arrive at the scene of the fight before anyone else did.

But not long before. What Justin found when he made it was a group of four of the smaller machines with the spinning tops firing at targets hidden between the ruins. Justin could make out where they were by following the machines' line of fire but the others had taken good cover and weren't easily hit. Justin still thought he heard someone's moans of pain in between the racket of the fight, but he wasn't sure if that sound was real or placed there by his mind, taken from the wide assortment of such sounds stored in the drawers of his memory.

Naya and Jessica were crouching behind a thick block of concrete that had metal sticking out of it and certainly was sturdy enough to block the enemy fire. Justin purposefully did not find cover in the same location but when to the left, past Mildred, who'd found what was left of a wall. It wouldn't hold concentrated fire, but so far no one was firing at them, as they hadn't joined the fight yet. There was no point drawing attention to themselves if they weren't certain their efforts would actually be effective.

Also, with no immediate, split-second need for action, they were waiting for Justin to take the lead. Once he fired, so would they.

He took in the situation first. There were four machines on the ground, two more had been turned into smoldering pieces. These models weren't the sturdiest ones, though they were big on firepower. If they had to become involved in fighting, this was the enemy Justin would have picked. They weren't smart either. If their unknown comrades in arms took out but one more, the Magnificent Seven could take out the last three before those things had the time to react to their presence.

The much bigger problem was the hunter killer in the sky. Justin saw it reemerge just a second before it opened fire, and his warning was lost in the noise. Something exploded behind the cover of someone else and for a moment all the machine guns fell silent.

They started again, this time aiming for the HK, but there were fewer than before and they weren't doing it right. Justin saw their chances dwindle rapidly and a part of him considered getting the kids out of here, declare this a lost cause.

That wasn't who he was. Who he was was a man with a sniper rifle and very useful knowledge about this type of HK.

He was not, however, a sniper. Not a very good one, anyway. And they'd only have one shot at this. Or at least, _he_ would have only one shot at it. If the rifle survived, one of the others might try again.

With the odds not being in favor of him, or the rifle for that matter, it wasn't very hard to pass this one on to more capable hands; hands that already moved for the rifle the moment Justin took it off his back and were attached to Hank, who was a very good sniper. Disturbingly good. In another life Justin would have asked him how that happened as his companion never volunteered this information, but in this one he couldn't take the chance of not liking the answer.

Justin didn't think about that when he passed the rifle on. He checked out the cover Hank had and knew it would not withstand a direct hit from the HK. But if Hank hit the right spot, the HK wouldn't withstand a direct hit either. It was, like so many situations they found themselves in, live of die, with absolutely no room in between.

Justin had come to trust Hank's abilities, though. He watched as his friend positioned himself, then was distracted when fifty yards away another of the ground bots fizzled out of existence. This was their chance. He aimed his own weapon at the joint of the spinning top of another machine, the point where they were most vulnerable and that the others, doubtlessly, were aiming for, too, and pulled the trigger.

Three of the others echoed his fire, the others presumably didn't have the angle for it and withheld their bullets to keep their position secret. Hank was taking aim on the HK. The ground bot exploded within seconds and now the other two joined in their concentrated attack on one of the remaining ones. The fact that the machines hadn't been firing at them until now made it easier to take aim and place the shots where they were supposed to go, but that moment of surprise was over now. Still, the second bot exploded before everyone had to duck for cover in order not to be mowed down.

Justin's eyes fell on Jessie, barely visible in the darkness. She was cowering behind her block on concrete, her small form almost curled into a ball as she drew her harms over her head as if that would protect her from the bullets hitting the stone just above her. Only now did he notice that her side was unprotected, that a well calculated or just lucky shot could ricochet off the wall there and hit her. And if he noticed that, it wouldn't be long before the last machine did, too. Unless they kept it distracted.

He didn't have time to act before seven feet away from him, Hank fired his rifle. Justin saw the HK sway and knew it wasn't good enough a split second before the thing fired at the origin of the attack and Hank flew backwards in a spray of blood and torn flesh. Somewhere to his left, Naya screamed.

The rifle landed not far from Justin, just behind the cover of the wall that would not protect him from direct fire if the HK saw him here. Mildred was faster than him. She grabbed it, took aim while the HK had its attention on that other party shooting at it, and fired. The next second she dropped the weapon and rolled off to the site to escape any retribution fire, even though if it were to come, one second would have been too long.

But it didn't happen. The HK obediently exploded, just one life too late. What remained of it fell to the ground and squashed the last remaining killer bot. A few last shots rang out, then there was silence.

As always, it took a few moments for everyone to emerge from their respective covers and accept that the fight was over. In that brief moment of transition, the silence was deafening.

Justin got up first, his attention on the ruins around them. He was taking a risk here. For all he knew, the people they had fought with were not soldiers who'd been out to fight robots, but scavengers who'd accidentally ran into a trap, and those could be dangerous if they decided that Justin's team had something they wanted. Like their guns, or Mildred's wonderful sniper rifle. He gestured for Jessie and Naya to stay out of sight.

Seconds later, a woman rose from the ruins on the other side of the street. She was wearing rags in faded colors, something like a poncho with a hood thrown over her head and shoulders, a bunch of bags and packs hanging off her lean frame, and Justin's heart fell. Scavengers, he thought. Wearing anything they'd found on their run, which obviously had been going on for a long time.

Still, she didn't point her gun at him, and her companions – Justin could make out three moving around – were more concerned with their fallen friends than with acting threateningly, so maybe they were not the murderous kind. If Justin and the others were lucky, they might even be able to trade for food and ammo.

To show his good faith, he left his gun down as well, though both him and the woman had their hands rest loosely on their weapons. After a few moments of silently watching each other, the woman grinned. “Good shot,” she said, nodding at Mildred, who'd come to stand beside Justin. (Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Aaron stripping Hank's remains of everything still useable. He could also hear him sob quietly.)

Mildred returned the grin without humor and shoved her spoon between her teeth. Justin could hear it rattle against that one gab that she could never seem to leave alone.

“You scavs?” Andrew asked, appearing beside them. The woman nodded.

“Got a camp nearby,” she told them. “Place's got a lot to offer if you know where to look. You soldiers?”

“Was,” Justin informed her. “Looking to be one again. You know your way around here?”

“Could say we do.” She looked him up and down again, then at Aaron, who had finished his grim task and stared back with suspicion and no shame for the tear tracks in the grime on his face. “You lookin' for Connor's army?”

Justin didn't bother hiding his surprise. “You know about it?”

“Sure. Been around for a while, haven't they? An' people come here every now and again, lookin' for them.” She grinned again. “Admit, most don't make such an impressive entrance. You lot could actually be someone they need.”

“I think they'd need anyone they can get,” Andrew pointed out, staring that the armed people now gathering behind their leader. “Especially ones who can handle guns.”

“Everyone's got their own life to live,” the woman in the poncho replied, unimpressed.

“Yeah, but for how long?” Aaron muttered. Everyone ignored him.

“You can tell us where to find them?” asked Justin.

“Sure can. We trade with them sometimes. Not now, though. It's about a day from here, won't show you the way.”

“It's enough if you explain the way to us.”

She did, without hesitation. Justin had been worried there would be a price, but she volunteered the information easily enough. He wondered for a moment if that might be a trap but could see no purpose for it.

“You care to trade with us?” he finally asked after knowing where to go. “We're short on food.”

“What can you offer?”

“We have cigarettes,” Aaron immediately revealed. Justin glared at him but didn't protest. Someone had once told this boy that smoking could kill you and now he was adamant to keep everyone he cared about from doing it. Justin was fairly sure that the quarter of a cigarette he got a day would not get him before the machines did, but he agreed that they needed food more than they needed nicotine.

And cigarettes still were the best substitution for money mankind had ever come up with.

Besides, they were one smoker less now, anyway. Justin tried not to think about it when he caught sight of the half-empty, bloodstained pack Aaron offered to the woman and knew where he had found that.

They'd leave Hank behind here, maybe cover him with stones if there was time for it. The ground was too frozen for a proper burial and they couldn't take him along. The fallen scavengers wouldn't fare much better, Justin was sure. This was not an age for sentimentalities.

In the end they parted with the entire remaining pack, leaving them with only one more hidden away in Justin's pouch. “How about a discount?” Andew grumbled when the woman wouldn't budge on her offer. “Our buddy died to save your asses.”

“And my buddies died to find these goodies,” she countered, and that was that.

They parted with the cigarettes and in return they got six large cans of pre-war food, half a bag of jerky and a canister of decontaminated water. If they were lucky they would make it to their destination before they needed to touch it, but Justin wasn't one to rely on luck, especially since they didn't know how things would go once they got there. It never hurt to be prepared.

Although in all honesty, Justin didn't know what he would do, where he would lead these people if Connor wouldn't have them. Alone they couldn't fight the machines, and not fighting them wasn't an option. That was why they were all here.

  


-

  


In the end, he needn't have worried, and he probably needn't have parted with his cigarettes either. They found the territory controlled by Connor and his men easily enough the next night, after spending another day resting in a burned-out building off the beaten path. They would never have found the entrance to the bunker, which, of course, was the idea – the machines wouldn't find it either. Scouts spotted them and after checking them over and a brief round of questions they were admitted into the underground base. It was almost anti-climatically unproblematic. But then, Connor was actively recruiting, his broadcasts calling out to anyone with a radio, and according to the scavs, they weren't the first to arrive.

The bunker was not what Justin had expected. What he had expected was one of those VIP-nuclear-hideout bunkers like the one where Hank and Andrew had joined him. This one was more like an underground city created from closed-off parts of a subway system and the basement levels of a derelict factory. The was claustrophobic, with narrow halls and only very few separated rooms. Dozens of people seemed to live down there, but Justin discovered soon enough that it were actually hundreds.

Most of them were dirty like Justin and his team were. Water was too scarce to waste on washing here as well, obviously. All of them were thin. All of them wore more than one layer of clothing, even though it wasn't nearly as cold down here as it was outside.

On the way through the bunker Justin and the others caught glimpses of long halls full of makeshift beds, some partitions closed off by curtains, the only provider of privacy these people had. He saw children playing in the corridors and stopped for a second, because children playing anywhere had not been something he'd expected to see ever again. He saw a lot of people watching them with suspicion, and a lot of people nodding in greeting and even daring a smile. He saw people sitting on crates mending clothes, an alcove where two figures with scarves wrapped around their hair were preparing dinner on an electrical stove, people sleeping, people chatting, a teenage girl scribbling something into a sketchbook. He saw life happening as best it could.

Most of all, he saw weapons. Weapons on people who looked like they knew how to handle them. Practical clothes, ammunition belts, medical packs. Radio equipment. One man walked past them adjusting what looked like a night vision device.

They came across an open doorway through which Justin could see a woman with red hair sew shut a deep, long gash in the calf of a boy who couldn't be older than fifteen. He was biting a piece of wood and clinging to the edge of his bench with white knuckles. Either they didn't have narcotics here, or they were saving them for more desperate cases.

A young man with unruly black hair was watching the procedure from the back of the chamber. When he saw them pass he said something to the woman, patted the boy's shoulder and left the chamber to follow them.

He entered the room – once an office, by the look of it – where they were supposed to meet someone in charge, nodded at the soldier who'd led them there as the man left, and said, “Hi. I'm John Connor. I'm glad you decide to join us.”

Justin looked him up and down, momentarily speechless and wondering if this was a joke, or a test of some kind. Then he grinned. “You're younger than I expected,” he said bluntly.

Connor didn't seem offended. “I get that a lot.”

“I bet you do. Well, if there's one thing I learned it's that age doesn't matter anymore these days. Experience does.”

“Then it'll make you happy to hear that I've been doing this since I was twelve.”

Beside Justin, Andrew gave a low whistle. “So you're, what? Twenty?”

“Nineteen.” Connor grinned briefly. “I don't lie about my age anymore.”

It sounded like a private joke, but Justin only thought that if he'd tried to gather an army at the age of twelve, he would have lied about his age, too. “Colonel Justin Perry,” he finally introduced himself, giving a salute that was echoed by his team. “We're here to join you.”

Connor's smile seemed to falter for a moment, but before Justin could start to worry about that, the other man raised his eyebrows. “Colonel? Pretty young for that, aren't you.”

Justin was twenty-five. He'd just finished his training with the army and been on the highway between towns, on the way to his first assignment, when the bombs hit. “For lack of any superior officers around, I promoted myself a while ago. We had a ceremony.”

“It was lovely,” Andrew added, and Jessie snickered at one of the few positive memories they'd brought with them.

Connor's grin returned at that. “Well then, far be it from me to demote you. I'm sure you've earned it.”

“Says the guy who's a General at nineteen,” Justin quipped. “Sir.”

“Ah, I'm actually not, it's just a nickname. Our military structure is a little wonky at this time, but we're working on it. The only General we have around here is my father in law, who's currently on the way to Nebraska to set up camp in Lincoln. Actually, you nearly missed us.”

“This whole camp's gonna move?” Justin covered his surprise over the indication that this kid before him was actually married – somehow even harder to believe than that the kid was leading an army – with his surprise over all this going to be gone. The logistics of getting so many people north would have to be impressive.

But Connor shook his head. “The base is gonna stay. There are still plenty of machine-facilities to take out here. We just won a bit of the Earth back from them, we're not going to just leave it now. But I am going to move, with a lot of my soldiers, to establish a branch in Nebraska. Widening the territory rather than moving it. However,” he continued, “there's an assembling facility about thirty miles south of here that I want to take out before I move on.”

“Saw it.” Justin nodded. “It would be an honor to accompany you on that mission.”

There was something strangely enigmatic about Connor's slight smile. “We'll see about that. First, I'll get you someone to show you around and explain this place to you.”

  


-

  


John withdrew from everything after the meeting with the new arrivals. He knew some people still had things they wanted to discuss with him, but he also knew that the same people drew strength and courage from his own calm and level-headed demeanor, and he didn't feel very calm at the moment.

One of the advantages of being the leader was the fact that he had, if he wanted to, a room for himself with a door he could close. It was small, but large enough to contain a bed barely big enough for two, a cabinet stuffed with papers that weren't meant to be accessible for everyone, and a small desk with a small lamp that always reminded him how lucky they were to have a generator in this place. The bunker in Arkansas had relied mostly on candle light and gas lamps which had not only been pretty dim but also an unnerving fire hazard.

Especially with all the explosives lying around.

The room didn't have any more to offer by way of furniture. What little clothes and equipment John and Kate owned was neatly folded and stacked on the floor beside the bed. The clothes there were clean, or what counted for clean these days. Water was precious, but there was a large amount of water that wasn't suitable for drinking but clean enough for washing, and so they used it for that. The people of the bunker where divided into groups and every group got to wash themselves and have their clothes cleaned about once a week. It was not just a matter of comfort, although it _did_ wonders for morale. Most of all it was a matter of preventing the kind of unhygienic conditions that lead to the outbreak of epidemics.

The cabinet was made of steel and had been there when they moved in. It had one door that could be locked and behind it John kept the most confidential and precious documents, but generally just being inside this room protected everything from prying eyes. They probably wouldn't even have to lock the door. Everyone respected their privacy even though they were almost the only ones to have any. Sometimes John wondered what he had done to deserve such loyalty.

His mind wandered to Colonel Perry and his small group. There was no doubt after the brief encounter that the men, women and kids following Perry were loyal to him as well and trusted him to lead them. From what John had seen in the few minutes they talked, the man likely deserved that trust. He would make a good addition to their forces. John would take him along for the attack against the factory in the south to see how he acted in battle, but he could already see him commanding is own division soon enough. People with actual military training were a rare treasure, and John hoped that Perry would be willing to train more of their young soldiers if he lived up to the first impression.

John would leave the ones who'd followed him here under the man's command. There was no point in breaking up a team that worked. He did feel conflicted about that young girl who couldn't have been older than ten or eleven, but had long since grown past the instinct to keep children off the battlefield. There was no point in keeping them safe underground if it meant there would not be enough soldiers outside to fight off the attacking machines. Because if the machines broke through, they would kill everyone down here, and all he'd have done for the kids would be leaving them helpless.

He hated it, but he accepted it, as did Kate and everyone else. The fact that he himself had received gun training since the age of six helped.

Just a few more years and a childhood such as his would be considered extraordinarily sheltered.

In a way, his childhood had been ideal: giving him as much of the safety of the old world as possible yet already preparing him for the new one. Once again he spared a thought for his mother, once again tinged in equal parts with gratitude and regret.

His eyes wandered to the bed. There was a locked metal box hidden beneath the mattress, the contents of which not even Kate knew. In it he kept a bunch of pictures that no one but him were allowed to see, no matter how much he sometimes wished he could share the secrets they contained. One thing they did not contain were the audio tapes his mother had recorded for him before he was born, now long since lost, or the video tape of an interrogation conducted in a Los Angeles police station in May 1984. He had seen that one only once, that one time he had hacked into the police files, but the wild beating of his heart had punched each moment irreversibly into his memory.

“ _With the one thirty second under Perry, from twenty-one to twenty-seven,”_ Reese's voice now echoed in his mind. So his father had served – _would serve_ – under a commander called Perry several years from now. And now John wondered, was it _this_ man? Perry was not a rare family name, and he didn't know anything else about Reese's commander. Not his first name, not what he looked like or when he was born. It could be Justin Perry. Given that the man might be a command er pretty soon, it was even somewhat likely. But there was no certainty at all. And he year 2021 was still seventeen years away. John sometimes had trouble imagining the world in one month. It could be someone else.

B ut it could be this one.

As always when one of the scattered puzzle pieces Reese had left in his wake slid into place, John felt like a was acting according to some script he had no say in. And as always he wondered: Was he supposed to do something here? Assuming this was the Perry Reese had talked about, was John supposed to make him commander of the 132nd, a division that didn't even exist yet, and was he supposed to make sure Reese ended up in it? Or was he supposed to not do anything and let events take place on their own, without his influence? Was he endangering the past and the future by acting in the wrong way or would it make no difference at all?

He hated this. Hated feeling at the same time like it was up to him not to ruin everything and like everyone's fate was set and they were helpless to change it. He tried to live his life and make his decision to his own best judgment without regard for the bits and pieces of the future he knew but on days like this, it was impossible not to wonder. And doubt.

On days like this it was impossible not to worry about how much worse it would be once Reese turned from a tale his mother had told him into a real living being John was going to kill.


	4. 2007

The HK was large, the biggest one John had seen yet. It was at least seven meters high, the size of a small building. It's chain wheels were so powerful that it didn't matter that it couldn't fit through the narrower streets; any obstacle less sturdy than a bunker was simply moved down.

It had five guns, all of them pointing in different directions and firing independently. Probably had five robot-brains, too. And damn good armor. A tough enemy.

But one they just might have a remedy for. John crouched behind his cover, knowing that not getting seen was his one chance not to get killed, as the firepower of this thing didn't care much if there was cover or not. They had shown up in this town just before John and his men had, and so far the only reason the base here didn't have to be given up yet was the fact that there didn't seem to be very many of them, Yet.

He opened his backpack and took out the explosive. It was large, almost thirty centimeters long, and shaped like the stub of a cigarette. For its size it was surprisingly light, though, which was good. A heavy explosive of this size was hard to throw very far, and throwing it far away from the own person was what anyone handling one of these wanted to do.

On the other side of the street, John saw Hernandez prepare his own charge. “Wait,” he said quietly into his headset. “Don't activate it yet. Let me go first.”

“No, John. If this doesn't work-”

“That's an order!” John snapped, harshly, and Hernandez shut up. He had known John for ten years, was one of the very few who addressed him by his first name, and John rarely used his commanding voice on him. When he did, his old friend knew that protest would not be tolerated.

H ernandez would be angry later – Hell, he was probably angry now! - but John couldn't let him do this. Because if this went wrong, if John didn't get the timing right or the charge didn't work as panned, he wouldn't have a chance for a second try. That's what Hernandez was here for: The second attempt, if it was something other than technical failure that messed this up. John wouldn't ask anyone to be the guinea pig in an explosive experiment that  had been his own goddamn idea.

The HK rolled closer. The one good thing about these ones was that they weren't fast. And they couldn't fly. There was always that.

It wasn't firing anymore because at the moment there was nothing to fire at. John's division had placed dummies around the street to distract it, but they were out now. Any shot fired from now would be at a live target, and John dreaded the sounds coming again. He'd ordered his team to stay back until it was over, but there was no telling when someone was going to be an idiot.

Almost time, now. He judged the distance, the trajectory, then, finally, activated the charge. From this moment on he had ten seconds to throw, as the grenade could not be deactivated again. And he had to do it in the blind spot of the HK, or he wouldn't live long enough to see if it worked.

The moment came and John jumped up, threw his charge, and crouched down again without a chance to look where it landed. He'd thrown it right into the machine's path, and the movement would have alerted the HK that there was someone around. Doubtlessly it was right now looking for him. “Stay down!” he ordered, his voice harsh but quiet so it wouldn't be heard over the sound of the chain wheels crunching rubble.

Seconds later the explosion occurred, and by the sound of it, it occurred right underneath the HK. There was a brief bust of gunfire, but it ineffectively hit the wall several meters above John. Aimless. Another explosion followed, and another. John dared to get up and look just in time to see how small explosions ate their way through the HK's metal frame.

The explosive was strong, but the force of the blast very localized, and there was an EMP impulse being emitted as well, affecting the HK's defenses. Letting one of the charges go off to close would mean frying ones own equipment, but John's radio was still doing fine. He knew, because he could hear his men cheer through his headset.

They had a weapon against these things. That was damn good to know.

Once the explosions had stopped, someone drove a modified car over and a small group went through the wreckage looking for anything they could re-purpose. John hoped that some of the ammunition stored above the turrets had survived the explosions. Some computer-hardware would be nice, too.

A lot of things would be nice. John stood and observed the scene, then the scenery, suppressing a sigh and keeping his face carefully blank. In the dark of night, the few remaining buildings in this place were shadows against a shadowy sky, like looming giants. But even in daylight the place would have offered no characteristics to set it apart from any other post-apocalyptic ruin. Anything that had been remarkable in any way had been leveled a decade ago.

Ten years. When John had started his journey in Argentina in 1997, he had thought it would be a matter of a year or two, three at best, to make it to Los Angeles where Skynet's defense grid was waiting to be destroyed. Now it was the year 2007 and he had made it to Albuquerque. Detours, calls for help, and plain convenience had made sure that nine years after he'd returned to the territory of what used to be the United States, he was closer to his point of entry than he had ever been.

He hadn't really thought that he could just make a beeline to his final destination and force a final battle thirty years ahead of schedule, but, well, a boy could dream. In the end it had been a tedious process, finding his army, and he was far from done. Even aside from the manpower aspect – people all over the continent needed help. They needed to be organized in order to fight and to survive, and sometimes they just plain needed to be motivated. It was hard to find the will to fight if there was no hope in sight that there would ever be an end to this struggle, and while John had found that he could give them a lot by speaking of victory with unwavering conviction, it would have been easier if he could just have told them that the war would be won in 2029.

Or maybe not. 2029 was very far away, and many might just lose hope in the face of the long, dark road. Better to live year by year, just getting up every day to fight another battle and celebrate each little victory.

Snow was falling silently. It was March of 2007. Twenty-two years to go.

It was the year 2007 and John Connor was twenty-two years old and this year his father would be born, or already had been born, somewhere in this endless wasteland.

Once all the scrap pieces were loaded onto the car, John had his men move back to the bunker of the season. It had already been established when they made it here, which had made for a nice change. John had had contact with the people running it on the radio more than once and had known them to be capable and brave. Unfortunately, they had been killed by one of those giant hunter killers they'd just blown to pieced briefly before John got here.

At least they could take those things out now. Unfortunately, the grenades were difficult to make and dangerous to use, but it was a start, John thought, trying to stay positive as he walked the long metal stairs down to the bunker's east entrance. Upstairs, the sun was rising behind the clouds and the snow reflected the weak light, turned the world into a death trap.

This bunker was more of a labyrinth of small sections, spread widely underneath the city, than the large cavities they were used to. John liked it – it offered some security that meant in case of attack only part of them would be lost. Just like how when a chimney leading outside had collapsed last year during a storm, only part of them had frozen to death overnight.

John was bone tired when he made his way to their command center, which in this case had roughly the size of someone's living room. He knew Hernandez felt the same way but they had to report the success of their experiment before any of them could go to sleep.

It took an hour to talk through everything relevant and set up the steps taken from here, but they were lucky: No disaster suddenly came up, nothing urgent happened that needed to be taken care of. And afterwards there was food: colorless, tasteless protein sludge that was, at the moment, the only – and less popular – alternative to roasted rat, but it was food, and John's stomach felt like it was eating itself, so food of any kind was good.

Eating sludge from a bowl in the tiny room where he slept when he could, his thoughts once again wandered to his father. Was he alive yet? Who were his parents? Did they have enough to eat? Were they safe? Probably not; Reese had told Sarah that he grew up starving, hiding from the machines. Had shown her the bar code burned into his arm. _'Promise me,'_ his mother's voice whispered from far away, and the memory of his own voice answered, _'I promise,'_ but he didn't even know where to start.

His eyes were glued to the stack of clothes piled up at the foot of the bedrolls. Almost against his will, John put his empty bowl aside and started moving them away from the wall, separating the layers until he found what he was looking for: the flat metal box with the combination lock that he took everywhere yet hadn't opened in years. What was in there had no practical value and was, in fact, a risk of a kind. He should have let it go years ago.

The combination was not his birthday, or Kate's, or Mom's, or any other number that someone could guess. It was seemingly random. No one but Kate even knew about this box and he knew she wouldn't pry, but he felt safer that way. He opened the lid and the first thing he saw was his mother's face, and it was like a physical punch even after all this time.

His mom, young, like he didn't remember her being. The age he was now, but different. Like someone whose childhood had only just ended, who was only now facing the world as it was. John had inherited this picture along with the tapes, had never paid it much mind while she was still alive. Now he traced the lines of her face as she stared into the distance, at something outside the scope of the camera and most likely invisible to anyone else.

He didn't know what she'd been thinking about, but he could guess, because he had seen that look on her face far too many times. There had been a time when he used to hate this photo. Now it was one of the very few things he had left to remember her by and he couldn't let it go.

Mom was sitting in a jeep, under a blue sky, and beside her sat a dog, a German sheppard by the look of it. The picture hadn't captured its face, but John thought it had to be Pugsley, the dog they'd had when he was very small. He barely remembered it. Pugsley, while friendly enough, hadn't exactly been a pet, and Mom hadn't allowed John to play with him much.

He held the image for a long time, then set it aside, almost dreading what he could find next, because he hadn't put those pictures in there in any particular order or with any particular attention. He was lucky, however: beneath the picture of his mother alone was one of the two of them together, taken when he'd been ten and they lived in Los Angeles where he went to school with Kate. (Looking back, he couldn't believe that he didn't remember her from those days, but even so, he still didn't.) They were standing in front of the small house they had rented and Mom had her arm around John and smiled into the camera as if they were normal. It had been an act for the neighbors, but the love was real. Though part of his mother's smile might have been anticipation regarding her plan to blow up Cyberdyne.

John smiled a little at the memory, tinted in more favorable colors by the rear-view mirror of loss. It had been ten years, and yet sometimes he still couldn't believe she was gone. There was no day he didn't wish for her guidance, and more simply, her presence. Even on the days when he didn't think of her at all.

Maybe that had been what she had felt like those last thirteen years of her life. John left the memory and the picture, moved it to the back of the stack, and his fingers, perhaps, trembled a little when he took the sheet of paper underneath and unfolded it.

It was a print-out of an image that had been grainy to begin with. Black and white, a moment captured by a security camera that didn't record a video so much as take a picture every few seconds. This was certainly not the only one taken that night but somehow the only one to make it into the police file. John had looked at it a lot when he was younger. He hadn't touched it in almost ten years.

And yet, it still seemed so familiar, like he'd just have to close his eyes and he'd see every detail. The inside of a factory, and close to the camera an out-of-focus, metallic shadow partially obscuring the view. Beyond that, a man in a dark coat holding a metal pipe that was just barely visible, halfway up the stairs of a catwalk. Retreating backwards but poised to fight, and shielded behind him a woman holding on to his arm, like she wanted to run but also didn't want to leave the man behind.

Minutes later, he would be dead and she would discover who she was when there was no one else. It was the only picture John had of both of his parents together.

Twenty-three years ago. Twenty-two years in the future. John was now the same age his father would be when he died. He closed his eyes and tilt his head to the ceiling, his fingers gripping the stained paper, feeling like an invisible line had been crossed. Like from now on, the days were counting down.

2029\. A year to look forward to, in the end. Victory over the machines. John would be forty-four, exactly twice as old as Reese. How old would he be when they met? It could be no later then 2027, but would it be sooner? What would Reese think of him? Would John be able to live up to the image Reese had painted for Sarah so along ago? Would Reese live up to the image Sarah had painted for John? Would he be the man John had longed for when he'd been a child and yet another of his mother's convenience-based relationships had run its course?

No, of course not. He would be a child. It didn't matter if he was already grown up by the time they met, he would be a kid in comparison to his son. John had long since accepted that his father would never be any kind of father figure to him, wouldn't fill the expectations John had had of father figures growing up. Wouldn't help him overcome his many challenges, or offer advice, or emotional support. If anything, John would do that for him, and that was the point where he always stopped thinking about it.

(He had accepted it, the way a terminal patient accepted their cancer. He hadn't made peace with it.)

A sound at the door got his attention. Someone tried to enter and found the room locked. A few seconds later there was the sound of a key turning in the lock and Kate came in, the only person aside from John who had access to this room that was little more than a glorified walk-in closet. By that time, John had closed and locked the metal box and shoved it back where he kept it. Only the Polaroid of his mother in the jeep remained, because he'd initially overlooked it and then spontaneously decided to keep it available. He was still holding it between his fingers when his wife sat beside him. (They weren't technically married. The institution of marriage had gone up in flames ten years prior, but they had been together for almost as long, so what did it matter?)

Kate took the photo from his hands, looked at it closely. She'd seen it before, but that was long ago. “I wish I had a photo of my mom,” she said, quietly but without bitterness. “I barely remember what she looked like. I remember the color her eyes and the way she wore her hair, but not what she looked like when she smiled, or was angry. I have forgotten her voice.”

John nodded slowly. One thing he hadn't understood when his own mother died was that they were doomed to lose their loved ones gradually, piece by piece. “I've been thinking about Mom a lot, lately,” he admitted. “Sometimes I still can't believe she's actually gone.”

“And sometimes it feels like so long ago,” Kate added. John made a sound of agreement, then indicated the picture in her hands.

“Some of the guys have been asking about her a lot. Thought I'd show them a picture so they'll let got of the idea that she was a ten foot tall super woman, or alternatively a super model with long polished nails and a D-cup.”

Kate snorted. “Well, with the stories you've been telling, it's no surprise their imagination runs wild. She was pretty, though, so I don't think this photo will stop her breaking hearts,” she joked, before adding ruefully, “I like her hair.”

John smiled, hoping she couldn't see the struggle behind it. “She often called that haircut of hers the sin of her youth. She'd like yours.”

Kate playfully boxed him, but he reached out anyway, to run his hand over the fine fuzz on her head until she gave in and did the same to him. There had been trouble with lice in the last bunker they'd stayed in, and as a result everyone's hair had gotten pretty much shaved off. At this point, John and Kate basically had the same hairstyle. It wasn't quite that romantic when most of the others did, too.

Hernandez looked quite hilarious this way. He had mourned his long locks more than some people mourned their lovers.

Eventually, John's hand trailed down to rest on her cheek, hollow from hunger and exhaustion. It made her eyes seem very big, and the shadows beneath them made them even bigger. Sometimes John thought that she could have been a beauty if only she'd lived in a world with food and skin-care products, but at the same time he could never think of her looking any more beautiful than she did in any given moment. He guessed that was just what being in love was like. There was very little logic to it.

It was Kate who finally leaned in and kissed him, like they probably should have done to start with, considering they hadn't seen each other in days and he'd just returned from a mission that could have killed him. But then, _any_ mission could kill him. Any mission could have him come back to smoking ruins where Kate's clinic had been. And they had never been very traditional in their romance.

If it could even be called that. A part of John still equated romance with dating and dinners and courtship. Him and Kate, they had fallen into friendship as kids, and then they had just fallen together and stayed where gravity had dropped them.

They lost themselves in each other for a while, but exhaustion kept things from going very far. Not long after Kate had come in, they fell asleep entwined on the bedrolls, the blankets drawn over them, for once not feeling cold.

As he let the lead weight of the last few days pull him under, John drifted past a feeling of vague gratitude that the lack of rest he got on a regular basis made it, when opportunity called, impossible for even the darkest thoughts to keep him awake.

  


-

  


Out of all the things she did as what counted for a doctor in this age, delivering babies was what Kate liked best and hated most. It was a duty not brought to her by violence or disease, but by life. As someone who saw death every week and feared it every day, it was hard not to love that. But at the same time there was always the terrifying possibility that things would go wrong and what was meant to be a wonderful gift would end in bloody tragedy. Her fear of making a mistake was never as strong as when a woman was lying on her table, yelling out her pain and pressing the hand of anyone who had a hand to spare.

Pregnancies still happened with amazing frequency, but only every other was seen to the end. Many women lost their children to miscarriages, or lost their own life before the child had a chance to come into the world. Others decided against having the baby, too terrified by the very real possibility of dying in childbirth or the hopelessness of not having anything to offer to the next generation but underground bunkers without privacy, tasteless food split with one more person, and lingering dread. So to Kate every child being born was also a sign that one more person was holding on to hope.

She had failed to count how many children she had delivered so far. She knew, however, exactly how many she had lost, and how many mothers.

This time, all went well. Mother and child were healthy, if exhausted, and even the father was around to hold his newborn son. Kate left them alone with Steven, who would note down the name and birth date and all relevant data, as well as check on the two regularly. Kate herself had other people to take care of; much less enjoyable tasks.

For a moment, though, she allowed herself to lean against the wall outside the small room they had for new mothers, and breathe a sigh of relief. So much could have gone wrong, but this time it didn't.

So much could still go wrong. There was every chance that the little boy would not live to be a teenager, or even see his first birthday. But for now, she allowed herself to revel in the moment.

June 24, 2007. It hadn't snowed in weeks. That probably counted as summer.

It was a good day so far. Kate savored the moment, but her quiet joy was already tarnished by the knowledge that the next room she was to enter contained people for whom this day would be the last.

Eventually, she pulled herself together, acknowledging her selfishness for wanting this moment of peace. When she entered the other room, hollow eyes stared at her from pale faces that, like hers, hadn't seen the sun in ages, and only some of them belonged to their patients. Kate nodded at Giselle, who was an actually trained doctor and an invaluable asset, and told her to take a break, come back tomorrow. Giselle went with gratitude and without protest, which spoke volumes of how long she had been on her feet.

Billy stayed to assist Kate in her tasks. He was only fourteen, but a fast learner. Like Giselle, he had already been here when Kate, John and the others arrived, and he was more Giselle's student than Kate's, but then, Kate was also a student to Giselle, and to anyone with a medical degree, in many ways. She had long since started teaching people herself, but there was still so much for her to learn.

In a way, though, she and Billy and Steve had it easier than people like Giselle, or Dr. Becker back in El Paso, who were used to modern technology and a seemingly unlimited supply of drugs and now had to make do without that.

They had some stuff. Defibrillators really strained the generator. Syringes had to be used over and over and cleaning them was a difficult process. Their supply of oxygen was so small that they rarely used it. Kate came to stand beside a woman named Ellie. She was of Asian origin, very small, very thin. It made her age difficult to guess, but Kate though she was young, possibly younger than her. She was a solider who had been hurt by shrapnel and had ignored the seemingly harmless wound for too long. Now sepsis was killing her. By the time her division had arrived back at the base, it had been too late to do anything to help her. But she was not in pain at this point so they let her go in peace, by request of her father who hoped her brother might be back from his mission in time to say goodbye. Kate felt conflicted about that but let them have their will for various reasons. She just hoped the brother's division would be back soon, as Ellie would not live through the night.

Neither would William, a man in his fifties who had been shot. When he had been brought in almost a week ago, Kate had checked him over and explained to him that there was very little hope for him. Maybe a little more with medication, but not enough to justify giving him any that would most likely be wasted. He had been reasonable about it, but instead of letting them end his suffering he had opted to fight on his own, without demanding any of the supplies they couldn't spare. So they'd helped him as best they could, hoping against hope that he might pull through. He wouldn't. Last night he had passed out from fever and pain and he would not wake again.

A part of Kate was aware that the time they had spend caring for him would have been better spend elsewhere, but she refused to let her thoughts go there.

Kate wiped the sweat off his face with a cloth, then left him be. The next patient waited. Another bullet wound, this one not as bad, with survival chances that allowed them to at least try, but there was no guarantee here either. Miriam. This girl's age Kate did know. She was fifteen.

Her dark face seemed gray with pain but she declined when Kate, after carefully considering the cost-benefit ratio, offered her another dose of analgesic. “Reminds me that I'm still alive,” she tried to joke through gritted teeth, and the man on the bed next to her muttered, “You go, girl.”

Henry. A machine had shot off his foot. He would live, but his fighting days were over.

A lot of soldiers here. It had been like this for years – ever since the machines started to show up everywhere and John's troops started to fight them everywhere. Before, machine related injuries had been rare and there had been a lot less to do, but those days were long gone. And even back then, Kate had felt overwhelmed by the amount of sick and injured to take care of. Nowadays, their focus had shifted to envelope only the hard cases, out of necessity. Everyone else was left to the care of friends and family, with only the occasional check up whenever one of the doctors had a moment to spare.

Today, her clinic, as people had started calling it, housed only one civilian. The man had found their base after weeks in the wasteland and was suffering from starvation and frostbite. His family was dead, so was everyone else where he came from. One of the small communities of scavengers that had formed everywhere, they suspected, but no one knew for sure. Nor did they know what had killed those people – shortage of supplies leading to starvation, an attack of the machines, illness... The possibilities were many. And the man hadn't said. They didn't even know his name. All he had told them about were the dead.

He was broken like so many.

Kate's thoughts wandered, briefly, to the prospect of children of her own and shied away from it quickly. She focused on her work, and when she had five minutes to breathe, she focused on explaining things to Billy, showing him how to change bandages, fight infection without medication, how to stretch a meager supply of drugs as thin as possible without rendering them entirely ineffective, and eventually how to drain accumulating blood from the stump of an amputated limp. Henry was amazingly patient as a training subject. When Kate thanked him, he just remarked that he was happy he could still be of use to _someone_.

Most of the things Kate explained to Billy he already knew. She let him carry out the tasks and watched closely, occasionally offering suggestions on how to do things a little more smoothly. She tried to emulate Melissa in her teaching, the nurse who had, a decade ago, taught Kate the most important lessons in the care for the sick and wounded. It hadn't been the strictly medical stuff – Kate had learned that more from Dr. Becker than from Melissa – but patience, and endurance. Billy had plenty of the latter but lacked the former, becoming frustrated and hopeless when treatments didn't seem to work immediately. He became unnerved by Henry's screams whenever the phantom pain got too bad. In many ways he reminded Kate of herself when she'd been that age. It made her optimistic that he would find the other traits he needed to be a good medic eventually – including detachment.

Ellie died in the afternoon. No one even noticed. At the time, Billy was tending to Miriam and Kate was talking quietly to Henry, trying to learn more about him so they could find something for him to do that did not include hobbling over a battlefield on a wooden stick for a foot and getting blown up at the earliest opportunity. His fate concerned Kate. It reminded her in terrible starkness of the fact that this life offered very little to them that was not related to either fighting or basic survival.

Eventually, Miriam said quietly, “I think that lady's not breathing anymore.”

They informed the first solider who happened to pass by medical and the man returned minutes later with another to carry the body away. One of them looked stricken, and Kate wondered if he'd known Ellie, or if there was another reason for his sadness.

Another solider joined them soon enough, but he'd come for Kate, not for the body. His name was Willis, Kate remembered. She'd had to sew up a bad cut on his leg once, when he'd been but a boy, and after that, he's been in isolation for a week once, with a bad cold they couldn't allow to spread. By now, jut a few years later, he had outgrown her by a foot, but he still looked like a kid to her as he stopped right in front of her and saluted.

The salute told her what this was about before he even opened his mouth.

“Mrs. Connor,” he said. “You are needed in the command center.”

“I'll be there shortly,” Kate promised, feeling that the day, which had started so good, was going to get steadily worse from now on. Willis nodded and hurried away and Kate pulled a face at his retreating back more out of habit than out of real irritation. Somehow, she was always 'Mrs. Connor' when people needed her in her function as second in command of the Grand Resistance Against the Machines, as if only John's name gave her the authority she needed to fulfill her role, despite the fact that they were not actually married. At all other times, she was 'Dr. Brewster', or just Kate, but in matters of control and command they needed her connection to John to take her seriously.

It was an old irritation, but in the face of all their troubles, this was not a battle she could afford to spend energy on. Besides that, she was well aware that she had gotten this position of power, that she had never wanted in the first place, mainly because she happened to be the person John Conner trusted most.

Kate checked her watch. Li should be in soon, and before Billy or Steven left, Giselle would be back. She hoped nothing dramatic would happen in her absence but trusted her team to handle any given situation without her. Should William die while she was away... well. She had the utmost respect for this man who would never stop fighting, and a part of her might be grateful for not being there when he ultimately lost.

After some final instructions to Billy, who looked nervous but also curious what this new development might be about, Kate was ready to go. Suddenly, her clinic, place of horrors that it could be, felt like a sanctuary, and she was reluctant to leave it. At least in here, she knew who she was and what she was doing.

Walking through the winding tunnels that connected the scattered partitions of the bunker, Kate suddenly felt self-conscious, as always when she was thrown into a situation like this. She didn't even know yet what it was about. But she knew that it would end with a room full of men and women, all older and more experienced than her, looking at her for decisions and orders. Judging. Waiting for her to do it wrong.

She usually asked for advice and suggestions when it came to things she was no expert in. But the final decision was still hers.

People were looking at her as she neared the command center. Her presence here alone alerted everyone to the fact that something had happened. Kate didn't think it was too urgent, because she hadn't been dragged out of her clinic right away, but dread still build in her stomach with every step. She wished John were here, and not just because her bed, on the rare occasions that she saw it, felt very empty. Even if his presence hadn't meant that she wouldn't have to bother with this, she'd feel better with him around. Being able to fall back on his calm strength, the unending optimism he carried like a shield underneath the grim expression all this suffering tended to etch into his face. He'd been gone for a week, Kate missed him, and if he were here, she would know that she wasn't walking into command right now to be told that as of today, she was the de facto ruler of humanity because John was dead.

But no. Certainly she would have heard by now. News like that traveled fast. And everyone looked curious. Some looked disturbed, or worried. No one looked like all hope was lost.

Kate nodded at the guards before the command center that was really just a room the size of an industrial kitchen, which was exactly what it one had been. She tried to project self-confidence but was all too aware that her shirt was too big and dirty. She hadn't changed before leaving the clinic, was far beyond such pettiness at this age, but now she was aware of every stain on the light, sightly torn material. The oversized shirt made her feel small, like a child playing dress-up. That's what the old ones saw her as, the ones growing up all the way before the war, in a time when age had still mattered. They probably saw John like that, too. Kate had only just turned twenty-three. In another life she'd be in college.

But this wasn't another life, and everybody knew it. Kate stepped through the door and she took in the maps on the table, the stacks of handwritten reports, the projector someone had taken out of its hiding place under the cabinet throwing a colorless square of light against the stained wall. A new development, her experience told her, and from the expression of the men and women in this room it wasn't an immediate danger, but it was grave. Which probably meant the appearance of a new kind of metal enemy in a distant location or a change in Skynet's tactics. In her mind, Kate already filtered through the information John had given her about the future his mother's nameless protector had come from, and immediately her mind went to the Terminators, the infiltration units disguised as humans, that she had been awaiting with dread for the past ten years. But no – if it was them, everyone would be a lot less calm.

All these thoughts went through her head in the second before she spotted the gaunt man in the military uniform standing behind Major Jackson. The moment she did, all her new found composure went out of the window as she cried, “Dad!” and hurried to meet him.

Neither of them was ashamed to hug in front of the collected brass in this room, and none of the others said a word, although someone to the left coughed in a suspicious manner than Kate ignored. She hadn't seen her father in two years, and while she had known he was on his way here, she hadn't thought he'd make it for another month or so.

They both sobered pretty quickly, however. There would, hopefully, be time for catching up in private later, thought the woman who, if she was lucky, saw her significant other an average of four days a month. “What's going on?” she demanded to know, stepping away from her father so she could look at all the others at once.

It was Major Andrew Jackson who stepped forward. He was acting commander of the division led by Colonel Perry, who was currently out of commission with a bad burn and a broken leg. At first glance, the man with the colorless, thinning hair under his cap looked like he could have gone to school with the General standing behind him, but he was probably closer to Kate's own age than her father's. “We followed the Rio all the way to Santa Fe,” he started, and Kate found herself nodding impatiently. She'd been there when they'd been given their mission. “Santa Fe is no place for a base,” the Major continued. “The city is gone, there are barely ruins left, and what is left of the surrounding towns is swarming with machines. I have never seen so many of them in one place.” He pressed a button on the projector and a photo showed on the wall, showing a ruined town form afar. If it hadn't been for the faded blue head scarf of a solider caught in the corner of the photo, it could have passed for black-and-white photography. Even from this distance it was obvious that at least four aerial machines were swarming over the ruins. Kate had never seen so many at once. Where ever they had been so far, those things had been somewhat rare, probably because of he amount of fuel they needed.

But the machines were controlling all the petroleum production. It put them at a giant advantage, and the area surrounding Santa Fe had fallen victim to it.

Another picture showed up, this one taken with a large zoom. It showed a close in on the streets, and the machines patrolling them were a little blurry, but it was obvious that there were a lot of them. Usually, they only showed up in such numbers where there was something to protect or to search for.

“What are they doing?” Kate asked. “Are they looking for something?”

“Humans, is our best guess,” her father answered. “Although I can't imagine there can be many left there at this point. We found something similar in Flagstaff. That's why we came back directly without going for Springerville,”

Kate was confused. A large number of machines was alarming, but no reason to cut off part of a mission. “What else is going on?”

“There are large factories in both Santa Fe and Flagstaff,” Jackson picked up the narrative again. Obviously, the two divisions had already exchanged all the relevant information. “Producing machines at alarming numbers. If we could take them out, it would be a major victory, but I can already tell you that we do not have the men and the firepower for it, swarmed with HKs and other shit as they are. But the really disturbing thing is this.” He pressed the button again and the projector threw a picture on the wall that made Kate shiver: A giant pit, several dozen meters wide, containing bodies. Naked bodies. A mass grave, the dead stripped for everything useful.

While the people living out there in the wasteland or even inside the bases and bunkers could not afford to let anything go to waste, it was still obvious that this place had been created by the machines.

That wasn't the worst. The hole was at the far end of a large area surrounded by high fences and what Kate thought were turrets, programmed to shoot at everything organic that tried to move past them. On the near end was something that looked like containers from this angle, and other structures the purpose of which she couldn't make out. Between them was the glimmer of weak light on metal as machines on chain wheels moved between the structures and the hole. And in between the hole and the machines moved humans. Surprisingly many of them. Wearing rags, carrying dead bodies between them. Somewhere between the containers and the hole was a group of people who appeared to be stripping the clothes off the dead. The quality of the picture wasn't good enough to make out many details, but Kate didn't need details. On the other side of the room she heard distressed murmurs as people figured out what they saw.

Kate didn't need to figure it out. She only needed to recognized it. John had told her about this; it was one of the extermination camps his mother's time traveler had told her about, where humans were forced to participate in their own genocide.

She felt vaguely sick. And everyone not looking at the picture was looking at her.

“Was that as close as you got?” she asked.

“Yeah. Any closer was impossible,” Jackson replied. “Don't think it would've looked any better up close, though.”

“Would have been nice to get a better look at their defenses, don't you think?” someone remarked. Jackson scoffed.

“What for? At this point, there ain't nothing we can do to get to that place. And hell, it's the biggest group of people I have seen in ten years. Would make a great addition to our army. Instead they have to help the machines. If I could breach that camp and get them all out, I would, but we'd just get us all killed.”

The door opened, but Kate was too distracted to look who'd joined them or left. She almost wished someone would turn off the projector, because once she noticed that one or two of the humans in that camp were very small, she couldn't seem to look at anything else.

“Where did they even get so many people?” Lizbeth, Colonel Kowalski, wondered out loud.

“All the surrounding area,” John replied, stepping between them. Kate had never been so surprised, and so relieved to see him. “I'm sorry, EMP of a grenade fried our comms,” he explained before anyone could ask why he hadn't announced his return. “Anyway, we heard about the camp in Santa Fe from a group of scavs relocating to this city. They say the machines have been doing wide-range sweeps of the area, getting anyone squatting in the towns, even those out in Nowhere they never much bothered with. And the city itself, they have basically been digging through the ground systematically, getting anyone hiding in the tunnels. Who doesn't die right there is being collected, and then, I guess, the machines sort out the ones strong enough to work for a while and kill the rest.” He leaned against the table, his face unreadable. “However bad it used to be, it's just gotten a lot worse.”

  


-

  


The meeting lasted another hour or two. John took it over the moment he entered the room and Kate kept to the background, her mind going over the facts she knew about these camps from the pictures and the reports. Even before the discussion turned to freeing them, she knew that was what they would have to do. Never mind the potential recruits to the army – they couldn't just turn their backs to all those defenseless, suffering people and leave them to their fate. She wouldn't, John wouldn't. No one in their right mind should want to. But even a successful raid would bring an awful lot of difficulties. It would get them many, many wounded, no doubt – more than her small team could handle. If they got just half the people in the camp out alive, it would be more people than they had space for. And a lot of them would be sick or injured and need help. Kate thought about her prospects and tried not to be overcome by paralyzing helplessness.

Fighting this feeling was something she had grown accustomed to, but she had never been this overwhelmed by a task that wasn't yet upon her.

Similar concerns were voiced by others. Some even opted to ignore the development with the camps and concentrate on taking out the factories, but John left no doubt what he thought of the idea. Neither he nor any of the others had a better suggestion at this time, however. When they disbanded, they did it with the general notion that they needed to do _something_ , and that until they figured out what, they would watch the camps and the movements of the machines and gather more information.

John and Kate left together. She threw a look back over her shoulder at her father, but General Brewster was engaged in a discussion with Major Jackson and probably didn't even notice them go. He would drop by their place later, she hoped. For now, she couldn't stick around and wait until he had time for her, because something was bothering John and she was the only one he might talk to.

He was quiet on the way to their room. Kate considered asking about his mission but knew he didn't want to talk just yet, and certainly not here. So she was surprised when he was the one to speak first. “Please tell me something good happened here while we were gone.”

So he was bothered by the discovery of the camps. Kate was not surprised – anyone would be – but knew it was more than just the obvious.

At least she had one or two good news among all the bad ones. “I delivered a baby today,” she told him. “A healthy boy, no complications whatsoever.”

John threw her a look she couldn't read. She had expected him to smile, if only for her sake. He didn't. “What's his name?”

“James,” Kate said. “James Stevens. His mom is Kathy Stevens, one of Colonel Perry's recruits.”

“I see. That's great.” He smiled now, but it seemed like an afterthought.

Another twelve or fourteen years, and the boy would make a nice addition to John's army. Kate didn't voice the thought, as it would have been cruel. She knew John didn't like sending children into battle any more than she did. She didn't understand the necessity behind it any less than him, but that didn't mean they didn't _hate_ it.

Her fingers slid over her belly, lingered there for a moment before she realized what she was doing and let them drop. She wasn't pregnant, that much she knew. It had been months since she'd last been with John – she would have noticed by now. But it was a recurring nightmare of hers – a literal, waking up unsettled and in cold sweat nightmare – that she would find she was. As a little girl, Kate had always just assumed that one day she'd have kids of her own. She'd picked out names and changed her mind about them every few months. (Jason for a boy. Then David. Then Dillon. For a girl she'd favored Chayenne for a long time, before Ella and Recada had taken over.) These days the idea filled her with horror. She welcomed every new life in this world, admired the parents willing to invest in hope and brave this immeasurable challenge, but she didn't know if she'd have that same kind of courage. She and John had always made a point of not being entitled to any benefits due to their position besides the necessary like a private room. They would have to send their children into war.

Or let them go, as the fact of the matter was. They didn't force anyone to fight. They just encouraged it, and accepted anyone able to handle a weapon whose age was at least in the double digits.

Whenever Kate hated herself, she reminded herself that Skynet and the machines were to blame and redirected her hate accordingly. Today it was exceptionally easy.

  


-

  


“What's wrong?” Kate asked the moment the door fell shut behind them. John wasn't surprised. She knew him too well.

The one good thing about the constant, nerve wrecking tension during his long missions was that he rarely had time to miss her.

“I'm tired,” he replied. It was the truth – he was tired, to the bone. It was nothing new, he always was. They all were. Kate didn't look like long, restful nights either. They were always fighting, always dealing with some crisis or another. More often than not John was convinced that he would not get to rest enough not to feel tired until the war was over.

More than twenty years to go. Twenty-two. His entire lifetime once more until anyone could feel safe.

“It's got something to do with those camps,” Kate observed as if he hadn't said anything at all.

“Yeah.” John felt it was time for some sarcastic comment here, but he was too tired even for that. “Well, they're upsetting.”

“And you knew they were coming.”

“I did. Guess I hoped they wouldn't.”

She got that look on her face then, something like resigned sympathy. John never really thought they wouldn't happen. Everything had happened so far. Maybe he'd thought they would happen later. “It's a whole different matter, actually seeing them,” he admitted. “Seeing how horrible they are. Those people in there... We can't help them, Kate. Not yet. We will find a way, I swear, but right now any attempt would be suicide. They have to fucking _wait_.” John had to wait before he could act. He had to wait knowing what was going on. With his mother's goddamn voice in his ear.

“Even knowing that this was coming, there was nothing we could have done,” Kate said, so fucking sensible. “It's not like you didn't do everything in your power to get as many people to join us as possible. You already saved a lot of lives, John.”

“That's not enough.” He sighed, ran a hand through his hair. The temptation to end this conversation by falling asleep on the spot was strong. Instead, he once again faced the decision of what he could tell his wife and what he shouldn't. “The man who protected my mom from the terminator,” he eventually said, carefully. “When he told her about the camps, he showed her the bar code the machines had burned into his arm in one of those.” Now Kate looked even more upset, no doubt because of one more parallel between the work camps of the machines and the concentration camps of the Nazis that everyone had been eager not to mention during their discussion. “Well, he saved her life, you know,” he went on. “Lost his own in the process. So obviously mom felt a little obligated to him, I guess. She asked me to try and make sure he's not in there too long.”

That sounded entirely too banal. John remembered the distant look in his mother's eyes when she told him about the camps, and how her voice faltered just once when she mentioned Reese's tattoo. He remembered thinking of Nazi camps that moment but not really getting it until she lost her composure and suddenly took his hands in hers with tears in her eyes, and said, _“Find him, John. Promise_ _me!_ _You have to get_ _him out of there.”_ And John, overwhelmed by the intensity of her voice and her gaze and still convinced that none of that would actually happen because they'd get Skynet before it could, had replied, _“I promise,”_ like an idiot.

“How would you find him? You don't even know his name,” Kate pointed out.

“I guess I have to save everyone, then.” Well, that was the idea anyway. John still couldn't keep bitterness out of his voice, because the way it looked to him this moment, everyone was screwed.

“And you will. Obviously that man got out, right? So we know those people will be freed.”

“Some of them,” he muttered. “You really think of the ones in that picture, any of them is going to be still alive when we are strong enough to come for them?” How long could a human survive in one of those camps? John couldn't imagine it was very long, but the machines were thinking with emotionless logic. If someone did good work, they would invest a minimum of food and shelter to keep them in working condition and it could be years until they were worn down to nothing. Especially if their survival instincts were strong.

But how much of a drive to survive could anyone have in there, when all they had to look forward to was going into that pit themselves at the end of their usefulness?

How long would Reese be able to survive? How long would he have to? John knew nothing about which camp he would be in or when. He knew he wasn't yet, though, because Reese would be a baby at this point and he couldn't imagine the machines to abide pregnancies or infants. And from what little information Reese had given on his military career, it stated when he was thirteen or fourteen, so maybe he would be lucky and barely inside the camp long enough to get that bar code burned in.

“We need to communicate with them, somehow,” he realized. “Even if we can't help them yet. They'll have to know we will. Maybe that will help them hold on.”

“You're right,” she agreed. “That won't be easy, but it doesn't seem impossible.” Her expression turned thoughtful and John's mind was already racing, going through possibilities. He needed to get out and talk to Kate's father, to Hernandez. He gave Kate a quick kiss and hurried outside, hoping to still find his Generals where he'd left them. Sleep could wait.


	5. 2012 - 1/2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. THIS is the chapter taking place in 2012. The previous one was 2007 with the wrong title.
> 
> 2\. In order to keep up my posting schedule, I decided to split every chapter with more than 14,000 words into two parts.

The short, snowless period called Summer was long over and the weather turning from cold to icy when a little boy lost his parents in the ruins of Los Angeles. He was small and thin, not quite five yet, and his father carried him easily as he ran through the snow-covered streets, and his mother was running beside them, and a giant made of metal followed them on chain-wheels that crushed everything they touched. They turned a corner and half-climbed, half-jumped over debris, and kept running, and over his father's shoulder the boy saw the machine turn the corner, too, never losing their trail. It didn't seem to hurry much, like it was certain it would get them. Then it started firing, and shots hit the ground just behind them, and then the strong man carrying him jerked, and stumbled, and made a sound of distress that made the little boy cling to him even stronger.

His dad kept running, but he was limping now, stumbling often over things hidden by the snow, and there was red trail behind them. The boy wanted to cry, but didn't dare to. Crying made noise. His parents had always warned him that noise was bad. It attracted the machines.

But the machine was already there and it was coming closer and closer because they had slowed down and it hadn't. Finally his position in his father's arms was shifted, and large hands handed him over into smaller ones, and he heard the words, “Take him. Run!”, and then he was looking over his mother's shoulder, through the mass of her wild blonde locks, at the machine that came closer and the man who was falling behind.

More shots. His father went to his knees, tried to get up, fell again. “Run!” he yelled, and his mother did, sobbing openly but running. She turned another corner just before the heavy chain-wheels of the machine reached the man lying helplessly on the ground in a growing pool of red.

Later, this would be the first moment to stand clearly in the boy's memory.

His mom was running as fast as she could, but she wasn't big and strong like his dad and couldn't run as fast with a child in her arms. Her sobs turned into cries of desperation as the machine came closer and closer, shots once again ricocheting off the ground and the walls around them. As they reached the entrance of the tunnel, she set him down, grasped his hand and ran faster.

The boy tried to keep up, he really did; fear and the grasp of her hand made him run harder than he ever had, but his legs were short and it wasn't long before he lost his balance when she pulled him forward faster than he could go. He fell, and his hand slipped from hers, and he didn't have the breath left to cry out. The last thing he ever saw of his mother was her pale hair bouncing with every step as she as she ran away from him.

Behind him infernal noise was coming closer and closer. There was a lot of debris in the tunnel, but it didn't slow the machine down much. In blind panic, the boy rolled to the left and climbed over pieces of the collapsed wall, out of the way of the terrible wheels. For a while, as it went past, the noise of the machine drowned out everything, even the rapid beating of his heart.

Later, after the last of the noise had faded away, he left his hiding place to go in search of his mother. He was crying, but he was doing it silently. The tears froze on his face and his hands and feet were very cold.

The machine had left feel traces in the snow, and he followed them because he knew it had followed her. He didn't dare call for her, but he looked very closely at every hole and into every building, hoping she had hidden like he had. Eventually, he came across the tracks of another machine like the one hunting them, and they mingled for a while, and then he didn't know anymore which was the one after his mom.

At nightfall, he was so scared and alone that he did call for his mother, no longer caring if the machines found him instead. They did.

  


-

  


Alyssa Nichols had been forty when the nuclear war that lasted less than a day took away everything she loved. It hadn't happened at once – her and her family had lived on a farm miles away from any town. They weren't hit directly, hadn't even understood for days, while the sky went dark and the power went out and the phone lines stayed dead, what had happened. Her oldest son had been visiting friends in Long Beach that day and she never saw him again.

A trip to the nearest small town had confronted them with confused and frightened people. A trip to the nearest city had confronted them with death and destruction. They had holed up in their house after that, waiting for help, for the government or the military to sort it all out.

Their cattle had died first. Those animals that didn't freeze starved when all the grass died. Their corn froze, too, or died from lack of sun. Her mother shot herself in their barn three weeks after her father and brother had left to get supplies from one of the towns and didn't return. Three months after what people had taken to calling Judgment Day, Alyssa's husband had been murdered by a gang of looters who broke into their home in search for food, clothes and weapons. Alyssa managed to kill two of them but had been forced to flee in the end, with her two remaining children, her pregnant sister Ellie and the family dog Ringo.

They had been forced to kill and eat Ringo a year into the End. By that time, Ellie had given birth to a dead boy and died of blood loss. Alyssa had been forced to watch helplessly as her son David lost first his toes to frostbite, then his foot and then his life. She had managed to keep her youngest, her daughter Suzie, alive for more than ten years. Some time late in 2011, about a year ago, they had separated to look for food and fabric and maybe medicine for Suzie's cough, and when Alyssa had found her child one and a half days later, she had been lying naked and bleeding and already almost gone in the ruin of an abandoned school. Sixteen years old, half-starved and with no memories of the sun. Alyssa hadn't had the strength left to cry. There was no hope for this world. Her children missed nothing by having died.

She would have killed herself the way her mother had then, having no reason at all to struggle through another day. But the ones who had killed her daughter were still out there, and while Suzie had had nothing to live for, she had deserved better than to die like that. Maybe Alyssa should have shot them both years earlier, the way many parents had. Now she was going to kill Suzie's murderers, and make it slow. She had enough bullets left for all of them.

Alyssa knew nothing about them but that they were men, the shape of their footprints, and that they had Suzie's clothes in their possession, unless they sold them on. She was patient, though. Asked everyone she came across. If they weren't cooperative, she made them be cooperative. Life was easier now that she knew she wouldn't have to live with her sins.

She had lost so many people, but not one to the machines. Maybe that was the reason why she hadn't been afraid to go where they were plenty. Or maybe she wasn't afraid because she wasn't afraid. What did she care if they killed her?

Maybe they had killed those men, too, and her quest was already pointless.

Maybe she was a ghost.

When the machines finally found her, they did not kill her. She thought they did, but she woke up again, sans her weapons and supplies, with only the clothes covering her thin, hardened body. She was in some kind of wagon, for the first time in eight years. She figured it had to be a wagon, because she felt the movement, the bumps in the road.

Alyssa was leaning against a wall, her head pounding and her neck stiff. It was dark inside, but she could sense, more than see, that there were plenty of other people in here with her. Like cattle, she thought. They were quiet – either most of them were unconscious like she had been or they had nothing to say.

It wasn't hard to figure out what this was. She had heard talk about the work camps the machines had set up, where humans were slaving to put away human remains. She knew there was one in San Bernadino and had avoided that area. Apparently she hadn't avoided it far enough.

Why she was still alive was beyond her. As far as she knew from hearsay, the machines selected their workers by their physical attributes, and while she was fit, she was also fifty-five and there had to be plenty of younger, fitter candidates.

But machines were stupid. Most of them had one programming and followed it to a fault. Her guess was that the collector had the task to collect any human it got into its grasp alive, and take them to the camp. And there another machine would probably make the selection. And she'd be sorted out and shot, or gassed, or however else the damn robots would dispose of those not chosen.

Or perhaps the machines, in their infallible logic, had simply figured out that it would be more efficient to have their victims walk to their death themselves.

Alyssa shivered, and not just because of the cold. She was okay with dying, but this was not how she wanted to go out.

On the other hand, did it really make that much of a difference? These were the last hours of her life, and while she had buried her god a long time ago, she still hoped that she would be reunited with her family and allowed to leave all this behind her for good. At the very least there would be peace.

Somewhere a few meters away, someone sobbed quietly. After a few minutes a male voice yelled, “Shut the fuck up, man!” and the sobbing stopped. There were murmurs but no clear words. Someone beside Alyssa shifted, and when she reached out her hand to find out who she was dealing with, her palm connected with the rough fabric of a coat over very small shoulders where she would have suspected someone's chest, the wool of a scarf, and finally unruly hair over a not very big head. A child, a small one. It flinched from her touch, but didn't flinch very far, doubtlessly for lack or space.

“Hey,” she said quietly, softly, not giving a fuck if anyone took offense to people making sound on this ride to neverland. “Who are you?”

The child didn't respond. It shifted a little as it drew its knees closer to its chest. So small. How frightened this little one had to be, in this darkness full of misery, after having been snatched by the machines. Alyssa's own children had been afraid so many times. She wondered if this one knew it was going to die. Perhaps she could make it understand that that was okay.

“I'm Alyssa,” she introduced herself. “I'm all alone here and I'm really glad to have found you. What's your name?”

She kept her hand on the wild hair and the child no longer tried to get away from the contact. After a long moment small fingers closed around her wrist and she thought the kid leaned into her touch some. “Kyle,” came the whispered reply.

Her heart clenched. Out of all the names in the world, it had to be this one. She hadn't heard it in almost fifteen years. “That's a very nice name,” she said, surprised by how choked up she sounded. Even though he couldn't possibly see her any better than she him, the little boy turned his head towards her and his fingers tightened around hers when she explained, “I had a boy named Kyle once, but he died very long ago.”

Out of all her family, he had been the lucky one. Chances were, he'd died without ever realizing what was going on.

“Are you alone, too?” she asked when she found her voice again. “Where's your momma?”

“Don't know,” he whispered. “I can't find her.”

She was probably dead then. If she wasn't, it made no difference to him. He'd never see her again.

Alyssa had no problem with facing death on her own, but she couldn't abide this child having to do the same. “Well,” she said, trying to sound positive. “We can keep each other company, can't we?” She wrapped her hands around the thin body, and when no protest came pulled it into her lap.

“Will you shut up, woman?” that same male voice from earlier hissed in her direction. “This is not a day trip. We're going to fucking die here, stop talking like that!”

“You're the one who will stop talking,” Alyssa replied, her voice suddenly sharp with barely contained fury that she _wanted_ him to hear. “I may not be able to see much, but I can still find you in the dark, and when I do, I will press my thumbs into your eyes until your eyeballs bust, and _then_ I'll break your neck, buddy. Don't test me.”

“Oh, fuck off,” he said, but it had a lot less heat than before, and he didn't say anything after that. Not even when Alyssa pulled the child closer to her chest and asked, “How old are you, Kyle?”

“Almost five,” he told her, his voice even quieter than before.

Almost five. God. “Look at that.” She smiled and hoped he could hear it. (She realized she hadn't smiled in a year.) “I am exactly fifty years older than you.” There was no justice in that.

She felt him turn his head again as if he could see her. He probably had never met anyone this old before, she thought as she stroked his hair and tried to get him to relax a little. He was trembling badly, perhaps not only with cold. Could be in shock. Certainly traumatized, like almost everyone in here. “Why don't you try to get some sleep?” she suggested. “I'll keep watch.” There was no telling how much longer the drive would be and nothing to stay awake for.

Gradually, the small body in her arms lost the tension and eventually Kyle's head sank against her shoulder and she felt his soft breathing against the exposed skin of her chin. After a while she became aware of the tears running down her face. Funny. She wasn't even sad.

“Don't worry,” she whispered into the sleeping child's ear. “Everything will be better soon.”

  


-

  


The ride took only about another hour. Nothing was better when they arrived, but Alyssa knew it would be. They only had to go through this last bit. Homestretch.

The back of the wagon lifted and a metallic sounding, impersonal and inflectionless voice coming from a speaker somewhere ordered them to get out. It was the first time Alyssa ever heard one of the machines speak. She could have gone to her death without the experience.

The light outside, while nothing anywhere bright, made her blink after the long dark. For the first time she got a look at the other inmates of the wagon: skinny men and women dressed in rags, with hollow cheeks and hollow eyes. Some where terrified, some only looked weary and tired like her. She assessed them and tried to guess which ones would be left alive and which would be sorted out. It was a way to kill time, as she was pretty far down in a line moving slowly towards some kind of checkpoint.

For the first time she got to see Kyle: Large, frightened green eyes staring out of a face where tears had left clean tracks in the dirt. Hair that might be blond if it ever got washed. He was smaller than her own Kyle had been at that age, and a lot thinner. There was almost nothing to this boy underneath the layers of rags. His grip around her hand war surprisingly strong though, as he held on to her as if she were the only thing keeping him alive.

Were the men who had murdered her daughter in here, she wondered. It was more than unlikely but she kept searching for that familiar tear in the shoulder of Suzie's coat, ready for one last act of violent murder.

She didn't find it and was almost glad. Her quest would not be completed but chances where someone else or the machines had completed it long ago. And like this, there was no reason to frighten the child even more.

Almost done. The line moved slowly but steadily, every step taking them closer to the end. About fifty feet from them were a number of machines, some of them permanently installed in the fence forming the corridor they had to walk through, some mobile and of vaguely humanoid shape. They had round structures that served as heads and were able to rotate, and four arms each, two ending in weapons and two in hand-like tools that let them handle things and people as the situation demanded. They were close enough now for Alyssa to see what was happening there through gaps in the crowd: Every person passing these machines got scanned, then either send down a ramp to the left that led to a cube-shaped building or they were grabbed, their arms exposed and one of the machines did something to them that made some scream in pain. They were being marked in some way. No doubt these were the chosen ones.

Alyssa felt sorry for them. Through the fence left and right she could see the camp they had been delivered to, could see the gaunt, hopeless slaves and all the dead bodies. That was not life, it was torture. Worse, it was serving the machines. Alyssa wondered what kept all those people from rebelling and getting themselves shot. There was nothing to live for.

Their slow parade led them over some kind of bridge, the floorboards loose and rusty. Apparently the machines didn't expect any escape attempts, because Alyssa could see a hole big enough for a small person to slip through. But there would be no point. It would just take them into the camp, down to where wagons full of bodies were waiting to be processed. If anything, they'd be sparing the machines the effort of getting their bodies onto one of them.

But then, that was what they had their slaves for.

Another hiss of pain, another scream. Alyssa hadn't actually thought Kyle could hold her hand any tighter, but he did. He looked terrified, his eyes darting left and right as if looking for a way out, and Alyssa realized that the only reason he didn't try to run was because his spontaneous, unfounded trust in her, based on nothing but the fact that she had been kind, was stronger than his fear, if only just.

He relied on her to protect when she was leading him to his death. Alyssa swallowed. Maybe she did have to pay a price for her sins, after all.

“It's going to be okay, you'll see,” she promised once again. Someone yelled something, and the line stopped moving. There was some commotion further down, but Alyssa couldn't make out what was going on. Panic started to spread like wildfire and was about to reach them when shots were fired and with one last scream, everyone fell quiet again.

It didn't last long. Soon a woman's voice reach them from the front of the line, crying “No, no no” over and over again in increasing desperation. Alyssa couldn't figure it out; she couldn't imagine people only now realized that they were being killed here.

And it _were_ the ones going into the square building who were panicking – the ones going to the slaughter. Maybe they had seen something that frightened them so much it made them fight back. Alyssa stood on the tips of her feet trying to see, for the first time in a year feeling the icy grip of fear.

Kyle was crying again, but he was very quiet about it. A true child of the wasteland. Back in the first years of the war, after losing their home and the safety they had, fatally, known for the first years of their lives, Alyssa had had a hard time making David and Suzie understand that their misery could get them all killed if voiced too loudly.

People were pressing against them from all sides now that the line had come almost to a stop. Too many people to come from only their transport. Alyssa looked around but could see no other cars. She couldn't even see theirs. Too many people. She lifted Kyle up and held him close, afraid she might lose him otherwise. He was so skinny. Chances were he had never not been hungry his entire life.

He'd said he lost his mom. If the machines hadn't gotten him he would have starved to death within days. This was no worse than that.

But then the crowd parted, just a bit, and Alyssa saw the line going into the box. It was moving very slowly, it seemed, and after a second she understood that it wasn't because people were frightened and refused to go but because the box was already full. Yet the machines kept herding people into it.

The observation was followed by a horror Alyssa had thought she had left behind a long time ago. It made so much sense – the machines thought in terms of effectiveness, and why waste bullets, or gas, or fire killing people if they could have them crush each other with their own bodies? It made sense. It was horrible.

“It's going to be okay,” she muttered again, but it wouldn't be. _That_ was how she was going to die. She wasn't ready for that at all. For the first time she thought of fighting. Just to have them kill her quickly. But what if they shot her and not the child? Alyssa pressed Kyle against her, the strong fingers of her hand feeling for the fragile neck. It would be easy. Easier than building a grave for Suzie on the frozen ground had been. Her fingers trembled. The smell of burned flesh reached her nostrils, but it had nothing to do with the box. It was the machines at the selection point. They were burning something into the arms of the people send to the camp. Alyssa could see it now. They were very close.

She would be send into that box. And so would Kyle – if they didn't let her live, fit and tough but old, they sure as hell wouldn't see any use for a tiny, starving child. Alyssa saw the machines with the weapons, ready to fire at anyone trying to fight.

“Kyle,” she whispered. “Did you see that hole in the floor earlier?”

His arms tightened around her neck, but she felt him nod.

“Don't ask questions now. The moment I set you down, I want you to run for it and get down there. Can you do that?”

He didn't reply. She felt him tremble – still or again, she couldn't tell.

It would have been kinder to just kill him.

“I will meet you down there, but I need you to go first.” Her own eyes were burning with tears now, from terror and shame. Kyle finally nodded his agreement. Two more people to go before it was their turn to be judged. Close enough. Alyssa pressed a quick kiss to Kyle's forehead and set him down. Quicker than she had thought he could move he disappeared between the legs of the people following after them.

Alyssa was the in the face of the machine watching them before it could react. Literally in its face – she jumped up, clung to the round shape and started tearing at it, yelling all her hate out in one last, loud yell, like a mad woman. There was a single gunshot, then pain, then she was on the ground. Good, she thought. Finally.

Except she was still breathing. Her heart was still beating. And she was still aware of what was happening when someone or something strong and unforgiving dragged her to her feet and onwards, towards that horrible, black mouth that smelled of blood and death and sounded like the gate to Hell.

The cold was creeping through her body already, but it wasn't creeping fast enough.

  


-

  


There was something going on somewhere behind him. Kyle didn't look back. He thought about Alyssa and wondered what she was doing. Was she right behind him? He wanted her to be but he didn't look back. Run. Don't stop. Don't look back. He ducked between all the anonymous legs surrounding him. He'd never seen so many people (he hadn't know so many people _existed_ ) but now they were all just obstacles. But also hiding places. There was nothing else to duck behind so he tried to get as many legs and coats as possible between himself and the machines Alyssa had wanted him to hide from. Run. Hide. Don't look. The first lessons he had ever learned from his parents, right after Be Quiet.

Despair threatened to overwhelm him once again, but he kept running. Where was that hole? He thought he should have reached it by now. Did he miss it? Did he have to go back?

Behind him there was a loud scream, someone yelling in rage and hatred. Louder than any human voice Kyle had ever heard. The scream ended with the sound of a gunshot the moment Kyle spotted the rusted-through hole in the metal plating of this bridge. With tears burning in his eyes, he slipped through it.

The drop down was deeper than expected and he landed wrong, twisted his ankle. Biting his lip to keep from crying out he immediately ducked between the steel wagons loaded with still, pale people and moved away from where anyone would first look for him. Ducking so low he had to move on his hands to keep from falling over, he found a way to the wall of the tunnel, beneath the bridge he had just dropped from, and there he found a gab underneath the metal plates the construction was built on and slipped beneath it, knowing it would be too narrow for any adult to follow him.

There was surprisingly much space under the metal plates. It was dark, and dark was good, dark was a hiding place. Kyle burrowed deep into it, keeping the opening just barely in his sight so he would see if Alyssa showed up. He was freezing cold, shaking all over. His ankle hurt and he was tired and afraid. His mom wasn't here and he understood enough of this place to know that it was not a place he could leave, that he would never find her now. Never. In his mind he saw, over and over, his father falling down and the machine coming closer. He squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears, curling into a little ball in his attempt to shut the images out.

Then he realized that like this he couldn't see if Alyssa showed up. His eyes flew open and saw the same sight as before; A little bit of wall, a little bit of sky, and the edge of the one of wagons. Had he missed her? Panicking, Kyle shuffled closer to the opening, then shuffled back when a machine rolled past it. He peered out after it was gone but Alysss's white hair was nowhere to be seen. The only people he saw were far away and they looked different. They were the workers he had seen before. The machines left them alone. They wouldn't leave him alone. They wouldn't leave Alyssa alone. He listened for her voice but heard nothing except the shuffling footsteps on the bride above him. Every now and then there was a human voice, crying out, but he could never understand the words. Maybe there were no words.

After a long time, the sounds faded.

From on of of the wagon in front of him, the white hand of a person was hanging into view. It didn't move at all, not once in all the time Kyle was staring at it. He wanted it to move. He knew it wouldn't.

The light faded, too.

After a very long time, when it was almost all dark, people walked by Kyle's hiding place. Many, many of them. He saw their shoes and their legs. If they spoke at all, he didn't hear it. No one saw him. No one stopped. Alyssa didn't show up. Kyle no longer expected that she would.

After a few minutes there were no people anymore. Kyle didn't dare to move from his hiding place until much, much later, when it was very dark.

  


-

  


Defeating his fear and the pain in his ankle to go out at night had been a good idea. There were many machines in this place, but Kyle was used to moving in the dark, unseen. He could hide, and he was very small. He fit into spaces where the machines didn't look for anyone because everyone else in this place was bigger.

Kyle had seen some of it from the bridge, when Alyssa had lifted him up. There was a fence around all of it, and he had seen the weapons mounted to it that would shoot everyone trying to climb over. His father had shown him a similar fence once, without all the people and not as high, and explained that he should never go near one, because if he did, he would die. Kyle stayed away from it. There was no way out there.

There was a big pit on one end of the fenced area, and the big square building in the center that he thought Alyssa had been put into along with all the others. Kyle circled it, carefully, one time, looking for a door or a window, but there were no windows, and the only door was up at the end of the bridge that he didn't dare try to climb. No sound came out of the cube. It stood dark and silent, looming over him and terrifying him now no less than it had when they arrived.

The other humans, the ones still alive, were all inside the containers at the far side of the camp, or lingering around them. Kyle could see them because the containers only had three walls, and there were basins with glowing embers placed in each of them, providing warmth and also a little bit of light. In that light, Kyle could see many people gathering around those basins. He knew from experience that their warmth didn't reach far, and as he watched, someone tried to pull someone else away from the glow to take their place. Angry voices cut through the silence and kept him from getting closer. His fingers seemed to be freezing in their gloves and his teeth were chattering, and he wanted that warmth so badly, but he knew those people were not friendly. This little bit of warmth was all they had and they would not share it with him. And he was too small and weak to fight for it.

There was no protection there and he couldn't protect himself. He was cold, and very alone, but Kyle had learned at a very young age that groups of people were dangerous. Even one single person was dangerous. Strangers couldn't be trusted, his father never left him alone with any of the few people they had met in the ruins where they'd been hiding all his life. Kyle had found quickly that the mistrust was warranted. (He didn't remember his uncle, but he remembered blood and his mother telling him that food had been the reason.) The only people he had ever felt safe with were his parents, and Alyssa.

He wondered if she was dead. Maybe he could have protected her if he'd been braver, if he hadn't run. (But she'd _wanted_ him to run! But what _if_?)

There were more sources of gleaming light outside the containers. There were lines of roofs offering protection from falling snow but little more than that, and under them, like in the containers, two-leveled constructions that people were sleeping on. Like beds, perhaps. But the beds he had known so far had all been on the ground and broad enough for three people. These offered barely enough room for one grown up.

People were still sleeping on them, if they weren't struggling for a place at the fire. So many people – Kyle was overwhelmed by their sheer number, and by his own loneliness. Maybe there was someone like Alyssa in that crowd.

That was a stupid thought. Dangerous. He pushed it away with all his might. He needed to be brave, and not stupid. He needed to bite his lip so his chattering teeth wouldn't make a sound that would give him away to the machines, or any of those humans.

With effort, he turned away and went back to exploring this place while he still could.

  


-

  


“You're crazy.”

The words were harsh. John was surprised. He had expected Kate to react negatively, but he hadn't thought she would be this _angry_. “You're a fucking nutcase,” she continued, one hand on her hip and the other on the door handle, as if she wanted to make sure he couldn't get out before she strangled him.

“And here I'd been afraid you might be worried,” he tried to joke.

It was entirely the wrong thing to say. Kate stepped away from the door, her face expressionless and pale with anger, and for a moment he thought she was going to slap him. Kate abhorred violence against anything none-metal but John had a talent for pushing people past their limits. She only got in his face, though, presumably so he could feel her breath when she hissed, “You utter moron!”

“What do you want from me?” he snapped back. He wasn't really angry, but they were obviously having a fight here, and it seemed an appropriate tone of voice to to express his frustration and play over other things. It was not a tone he used often. “We gotta do something! I thought we were on the same page there!”

“Oh, we are. But you had to come up with that!”

“It's the only thing anyone came up with, remember? And as plans go, we've had worse.”

“I didn't say the plan was stupid. I said _you're_ stupid! And that's what everyone else thinks, too!”

John knew it was. By this point, it was rare that anyone outside his closest circle of friends challenged his decisions, but today there had been a lot of protest. He'd been almost glad he'd finally found something that made them question him, but that didn't mean he could change his mind, because that was simply not an option.

“Yet you're the only one calling me an idiot.”

“I'm doing it in the name of mankind,” Kate said, matter-of-factly. “No one thinks it shouldn't be done, but no one thinks _you_ should do it. There are enough volunteers. Pick one of them!”

“No. It has to be me.”

“Why, pray tell, is that? Give me one good reason why it has to be the great John Connor on this mission! Because I can give you twenty why it shouldn't. It's suicide, for starters.”

“That's exactly why I can't order anyone else to do this for me.”

“It's not for you, it's for them!”

“It's my plan.”

“So what?”

“And how would I know if they're _not_ doing it for me? They'd do anything for me.” It showed that he was doing something right probably, but he hated the responsibility it cursed him with.

“Exactly! Do you honestly think, for one second, that this revolution would survive without you at this point? You're way too important to throw your life away like this!”

“You think so? What is my life wort if I'm not willing to risk it? You know why people follow me? Because I'm willing to go first. Because I never ask them to do anything I won't do myself. And I ask a _lot_ of them!”

“And now they're asking you not to go. _I'm_ asking you not to go!”

John bit his lip to keep from saying something stupid. She was being unfair, but she was also being honest. He tried to imagine their positions reversed for a moment and shied away from the thought.

As their leading medic and someone experienced in and capable of organizing giant camps full of people with too little means, Kate was far too valuable to risk and more than once John had been secretly glad about this very good reason to keep her away from any danger, aside from the general danger that was their life.

“Kate,” he said, keeping his voice very calm. “I have to.”

There were tears in her eyes – whether they were tears of despair, frustration, or anger he couldn't tell. She didn't reply; she had to know that this battle was lost.

“If it makes you feel better, we know I'm not going to die,” he continued. “We know the future, after all.”

“A possible future,” Kate countered. “You're not immortal, John. All we know is that there is hope if you live, you ass.”

John had no answer to that. Changing the future was something he and his mother had tried over and over again and failed. Him dying – that would be a change, and one easily achieved, but not a good one. He did not think he was immortal. In fact, he would be as careful as he could be, since he very much did not want to die, and not just because he knew how much hinged on his continued existence. There was some comfort in the possibility, though; the promise of a chance. If he could die at any time, the future was not set and he could still change so many things.

He sighed and turned to the now unprotected door. “I love you,” he told his wife but did not make a move to kiss her before he left, not knowing if she would welcome it.

She didn't kiss him either, just watched him leave. “Remember that we need you,” she told him, and he knew that didn't mean all of them this time.

“I know,” he whispered, and left.

He did not got straight to the command center where Hernandez and General Brewster were waiting for him to work through the last kinks in his plan before he put it into action. He went to medical, where Li was watching not only their blessedly few patients but over also a three-year-old girl who had fallen asleep on one of the free beds, apparently in the middle of chewing on the ear of a stuffed toy someone had found for her.

Taking a moment to watch her sleep, John was, more than anything, grateful that Kate hadn't used her as a bargaining chip to keep him from going. After a moment of indecision, he decided not to wake her up, despite knowing that this might be the last time he'd see her. He decided to be optimistic about this. (And she was too young, anyway. If he didn't return, eventually she would forget him.)

Jeanette had been a conscious choice that he and Kate had made. They hadn't actively tried to have a baby, but they had accepted the possibility that they might. Still, sometimes he doubted, and those were the times when the fear was the strongest that he would never be able to give her anything more than this, or that one day he'd have to watch her die. He never regretted her, though.

He did, however, regret that he would miss much of her life by being on missions. He couldn't be the father he had always longed to have. But at the very least, if things went his way, he would be a father who was alive.

He very much wanted to live. Now more than ever.

After a final look at his daughter, he nodded at Li and walked away, to have his Generals tell him the best way to get captured by the enemy.


	6. 2012 - 2/2

There were plenty of hiding places around, and better yet: the fact that most of the constructions were built on metal plates covering the ground left a lot of spaces underneath to not only hide but to move around. Kyle did so very carefully at daytime, because all the people were out and about then and so were the machines. He knew that if any of them found him he would die, and he had seen enough people die in horrible ways for dying to terrify him. (He did not necessarily fear death.)

Hunger kept him going. His stomach was far beyond rumbling, which was good because surely that would have given him away, wouldn't it? He moved, underneath the plates, towards the now-deserted containers because he had seen the people there being fed at dawn, before the machines made everyone leave and work. One man hadn't left his bed, and he hadn't moved later when two of the others dragged him to one of the wagons. Kyle thought that maybe his food was still there. He didn't think so – food did not get left when there was anyone around to eat it, ever, but his hunger forced him to check anyway.

It wasn't easy getting there. There was no direct connection between the area Kyle was in and the containers and roofs, and he had almost given up, knowing that he couldn't make it in plain view without being seen, when he found a tunnel in the earth, losing itself in total darkness after just a meter. It led in the right direction and darkness was, in general, good, so Kyle didn't hesitate to crawl inside, finding it more than wide enough for his small body to fit through.

The walls of the tunnel were uneven and at some points they seemed to be partially collapsed. Kyle found his way in the dark; it wasn't hard as there was only one direction. Eventually he found weak light at the end of the tunnel, and an unmistakable smell that told him he was nearing an area occupied by humans.

The light he was crawling towards was so weak that he only realized it was falling through small holes in a metal plate blocking the tunnel's exit when he almost collided with it. For a second despair threatened to overwhelm him, but when he pressed against the crate he found that it wasn't locked or bolted into place. He could easily remove it, and when he did he found himself in a network of tunnels made of metal, underneath metal crates that admitted some of the pale light from the sky. The plate before the tunnel wasn't blocking, it was hiding it.

This was an entirely different area of the camp. It was right underneath where the people lived when they weren't working and Kyle instinctively knew that at the times it wasn't deserted like now it was dangerous. The smell was strong here, but when he found a spot where clear liquid was tickling down through the grate above he found that it was just water: a little dirty but okay. Kyle pulled off his oversized gloves, collected as much water in his hands as he could and drank greedily. He'd been so thirsty. He still was; the tickle of water was thin and his hands couldn't hold much and it seemed to take forever for him to take in enough to feel better.

All the time he listened to the sounds of machines or people, jumping at every noise, spilling precious liquid. By the time he reluctantly turned away, his hands seemed to have turned to ice and his throat was hurting for other reasons than before. The icy water had made the ache between his eyes even worse, yet he regretted that he had nothing to capture it with and take it with him.

His exploration of the place revealed that there were various ways up, but he didn't quite dare go there. Not for a long time, anyway. Eventually, his hunger made him peek outside, and from a hidden corner he observed the area where the people slept.

Narrow beds without mattresses, just boards, always two on top of each other, the upper one reachable with a short ladder. They weren't very high. Kyle had seen blankets last night, but now there were none to be found. The machines had collected them at dawn, when the workers were send to work. He wished he had one.

The gleaming pots providing warmth at night where cold now. Beyond them, Kyle could see the long, narrow basing from which the people had eaten in the morning, but he couldn't see if there was anything in there still. Probably not. He couldn't _see_.

Eventually, after watching for a long time without anyone or anything coming near, he carefully, his breath stuck in his throat, left his hiding place and, sneaking from shadow to shadow, made it to the basin. It was empty. Tears in his eyes, he tried to get back, only to have to hide in the far too open space underneath one of the beds when a machine rolled past him. For an endlessly long time, Kyle was stuck there, expecting to be caught at any moment while the machine did something he couldn't make out. He was convinced that he would be stuck there all day and all night when finally it rolled away and, too hasty, he crept back to the hole he had come from.

The machine wasn't as gone as he had thought. It was coming back right then, and there was a second, as he slipped into the hole, when he was convinced it looked straight at him. Cowering in the tunnel, Kyle waited for death, but it didn't come.

Not yet. Not through the machine. But he was still cold, he was feeling weak and miserable and he hadn't eaten in two days. Before, his mom and his dad would always find something for him. Now he was all alone and all the tricks they had taught him about food meant nothing when there was no food to be found.

He thought about going back to his old hiding place at the bridge, but stopped at the tickle of water first, which had gotten even thinner. Not far from there a few steel plates were overlapping, creating a space between them big enough for him to roll into, and he did so, too tired to move all the way back. The darkness was comforting, but it was the only comfort to be had. Kyle curled up, trying to get warm. It wasn't so bad down there. Everywhere else it was worse.

He was very, very alone. When he fell asleep he dreamed of his father disappearing underneath the giant machine and about searching endlessly for his mother and Alyssa, never finding them.

  


-

  


Two months ago, in early August, the machines' camp in Flagstaff had been closed for good. Apparently the machines there had been satisfied that they had gotten all the people in the radius they had been in charge of and as a final act they disposed of the ones working for them by setting them on fire. The small, well hidden team John had posted nearby to keep an eye on the place had reported that one morning, after there hadn't been another transport of prisoners or corpses for days, all the people were forced to strip and driven to the edge of the pit of bodies. While the observers had been too far away to make out many details or hear anything, it had been clear that the inmates figured out what was about the happen and finally fought back in panic. Their fight lasted for seconds, until the machines used flame throwers on them. When it was over, a large bot with a shovel-like end pushed the remains of everyone who hadn't fallen yet down into the hole and it was closed with earth and that was that.

A day later the camp was gone. As effectively as the machines had systematically wiped out the human population of that area, they had disassembled the camp and moved everything reusable elsewhere.

After that event, it had been no surprise that the preparations for liberating the camps picked up significantly. What happened in Flagstaff would happen elsewhere, or it already had. Those camps came with an expiration date, and John wanted to get the prisoners out while there was still someone to be freed. Kate understood that. She felt the same way. She wasn't at all happy about the method chosen to accomplish their goal.

Because they still didn't have enough people or weapons to just storm the place. Besides, there was the fear that if they should actually breach those fences, the machines guarding the prisoners would cut their losses and kill them rather than allow them to be taken away. So the first step to freeing the camp had to come from inside.

The camp in Santa Fe would be the first they tried to liberate; their testing ground, so to speak. And that was where Kate wasn't okay with this plan at all: They had a lot of theory and not a single guarantee that there was a possibility it wouldn't go horribly wrong.

Santa Fe was the obvious choice, as it was the camp closest to their current base of operations and also the one, beside Flagstaff, they were most familiar with. They had spend five years staking it out, getting everything they could on the defenses, the guard bots, the schedule, and the state of the inmates. Enough to work out a plan. But for that plan they needed the help of the inmates and since there was no way of communicating with them from the outside, someone had to go in there and talk to them directly.

And that someone just had to be John Connor. Of fucking course.

So he would get himself captured, hoping that the machines still didn't have any idea who he was, and deported to a camp that had the word “extermination” right there in the name, hoping he would not be sorted out and outright killed because the bots found him unfit for work for some reason. And then he would try to make the other inmates fight for him, as if it was a given that they actually would. Kate could see so many things going wrong there. Chances were the people would be too scared to do anything against their oppressors. Someone might even rattle him out hoping for some kind of reward. John never considered that and had played deaf whenever someone brought up that possibility. He just couldn't imagine people being that way, screwing each other over for nothing, even though he had seen as many examples of that as Kate had. That sort of naive belief in humanity was one of the things that drew people to him, but it might just as well be what got him killed.

Yet, if there was anyone who could make this work, it was John. So Kate could be angry with him all she wanted, but in the end she did not stand in his way. This was the price they paid for being who they were. She'd never thought for a moment it would be easy, but sometimes it still took her by surprise how hard it was.

John had left that evening with a whole congregation of trusted officers and an army waiting out of sight. They had called all the units that were currently available to their base. Never before had so many of their soldiers been in one place and Kate knew just a well as anyone else that when this was over, their army would be a good bit smaller.

She only hoped it would be worth it.

John hadn't said goodbye before he left, and she hadn't gone to see him. It hadn't been anger. It had been her being busy and a desperate attempt to believe that this was not her last chance to see him.

Technically, Kate knew that John shouldn't die because he wouldn't be dead in the future. But how far in the future? John claimed not to know but Kate wasn't convinced he was telling her the truth. He seemed to have a vague idea, at the very least, that there was still a long way to go, and if she thought of all the things that hadn't happened yet, she was inclined to agree.

At this point, not the slightest bit of doubt remained that the story about the time traveler was the truth. Too many of John's prophecies had come true in the last fifteen years. But Kate was also convinced that he had not told her everything. There were things he was keeping from her, and she suspected that there was a good reason and didn't pry, but it made her worry. Why would he lie? What would he lie about?

A part of her still wasn't convinced that she hadn't been right about the solider from the future having been John himself, going back in time to die.

If that were true, wouldn't that mean he couldn't die now? Kate had spend a lot of restless nights thinking about the nature of time. Was it immutable? Were these things that they knew a promise or merely a possibility? She knew John worried about the same things, just with more knowledge than she had. It did not help her at all now.

Even if he did not die, nothing – _nothing_ – that she knew about the future even indicated that he might not get trapped in one of those terrible places for years on end.

Kate blinked back angry tears. There was no point in worrying about things that hadn't happened yet. She had other things to worry about. Like preparing for the case that John's mission actually worked.

For that she needed to be in her clinic, but she also needed to be everywhere else. If she was in her clinic she would have to help out with the patients – something her current situation left her no time for, so she stayed away, feeling guilty for the extra work she put on everyone else, but knowing it was the right decision, as being a doctor was not something she could do while her mind was busy trying to work out fifteen other problems at once.

The only thing she could do to help Giselle, Li and the others was to take the burden of watching her daughter from them. So Jeanette was sitting on Kate's hip as she made her way through the living quarters of the bunker, inspecting everything and holding council with Henry, who knew the organizational structure of the place better than anyone and acted as her assistant in this.

The smell of too many people and too little hygiene was strong here, though it was still better than the very particular smell of the clinic. Kate breathed flatly, through her mouth, and hoped no one noticed how the odor was getting to her. Normally, it didn't bother her – in fact, she didn't even notice it anymore. But lately, it made her feel queasy. She hadn't told John that she feared she might be pregnant again, just as she hadn't pointed out to him that he had a child he was responsible for now, on top of being responsible for everyone ever.

When Kate had been a child – a real child, before the world ended – she had always known, because that was the way the world had been presented to her, that she would have children of her own one day. And she had always thought that when she was pregnant, she would play up the hormones-thing and be a real pest and make her husband suffer trying to please her, like she had seen when Mom was pregnant with Charlie. She had found secret glee in planning for it. If she had to run around for nine months with a baby riding along in her belly, making her heavy and run to the bathroom every few minutes, then she would at least get a few kicks out of it. And foot massages.

Of course, her luck being what it was, civilization just had to turn to dust before she ever got the chance to have a baby, and when she did get pregnant it was just a months-long marathon of anxiety and exhaustion, and the man she was not-married to was so busy being there for everyone else and fighting robots in a nuclear wasteland that she didn't want to burden him with mood-swings and unreasonable demands the few times he even had chance to see her.

She had gotten a few foot massages out of it, though. This time, it she'd be lucky if she still had a husband at the end of it.

If there even was an end to it. If she lived. If her child lived. Three was nothing in the prophecies about John's family, so they were free to live or to die at any time. Kate loved her daughter dearly but her first pregnancy had been a nightmare and she still felt guilty sometimes for subjecting her sweet little girl to this world. She didn't know if she could go through with that again. But that was a decision that could wait. For now, there were other decisions to be made.

Like where they would put the inmates of the camp should any of them actually make it out. They had some room left at the base, but not enough. And once the raid was over it would be too late to make arrangements. So Kate was now planning, along with Henry, which sections of the base to clear of people, and where to put them. Everyone would just have to scoot a little closer together.

In the end, they would still have more room than the civilians had had in the first bunker in El Paso. (Sometimes Kate wondered what became of it. After they had left there, no radio contact had ever been established with that bunker again, though John and her father had tried.) The real problem were the supplies. They had enough food in storage to feed them all for a while, especially considering that the loss of lives might be higher than the number of additional mouths to feed. At best there would be a balance. What worried Kate was the fact that there would be many wounded, and who could tell what state the inmates would be in? The machines killed everyone too weak to work, so generally they should be more of less healthy, but it was something to consider. They needed medication, bandages, and room for those injured in the fight. Most of all, they needed doctors.

Everyone with even the least medical knowledge was already helping in some capacity – at least those who weren't also soldiers. For this, Kate had requested that all field doctors were kept away from the upcoming battle, and John had granted her request. Further, she had called every civilian not involved in a task that was absolutely vital to her clinic in the past weeks, where they received basic medical training. Enough to be of use when the time came.

It weren't as many as she had hoped, but it was better than nothing. Maybe they could get through this. Provided they found a few more old shirts they could cut to pieces for bandages, and a few more people who happened to know their blood type.

“We're going to need more blankets, more clothes, more food,” Lizbeth suddenly said, her voice breaking into Kate's consideration whether it would be best to clear this room, which was slightly bigger and had better ventilation, or one in the East Wing, which was closer to the clinic and to the room where they kept the dead before they could get moved outside. She hadn't even realized that the Colonel had joined them. Lizbeth was one of the few officers still in the bunker and not getting ready to match out. She had been put in charge of the soldiers who were to stay here in case of a direct attack, but it was a psychological measure more than anything. They were too few to really do anything but be mowed down should the base be discovered.

“Who would go?” she asked. “Hardly anyone left here knows the area outside well enough to find anything useful.”

“We still got some stock in the auxiliary bunkers at the edge.”

The auxiliary bunkers: Little more than holes in the earth supposed to give shelter to soldiers whose missions took them too far out to make it back in one day. Taking that stuff would take time, and men. There weren't many here who knew their location; even with a map they would be hard to find and maps were dangerous because they could fall into enemy hands. The ones who knew were the soldiers still left, but they wouldn't be able to carry much unless they took a lot of civilians with them who didn't know how to properly move through enemy territory. Because that was where most of the bunkers were located. And it would take even the illusion of protection away from the main base, while possibly leading the machines right to them.

Liz was looking at her expectantly, and so was Henry. And the young sergeant standing beside Liz, who Kate didn't know because he had only just moved in with his unit after the Call came. Meanwhile, Jeannie, still perched on Kate's hip, was fiddling with her hair and occasionally chewing on it, either because she was hungry or because she wanted to be a little asshole. And Kate realized that everyone was waiting for her to make a decision here, since she was the one in charge now, and they trusted her to know what she was doing.

And if they didn't agree, they would tell her so. There was comfort in that. It was one advantage that Kate had which John could rarely fall back on.

“We have enough to get us through the first week,” she decided. “Sending anyone would be too risky and leave the bunker too exposed. If supplies get short, we can still send out some of the soldiers after their return.”

Liz didn't look entirely happy with that, but she nodded and didn't protest, so it was acceptable to her. That was good. Kate didn't have energy to spare for a discussion.

She saved some by setting her daughter down and taking her by the hand so she couldn't run off while they inspected the next room full of nervous people who knew what was coming and feared how it might end.

  


-

  


Kyle woke up at night, briefly overcome by panic at the fact that he had let his guard drop for so long. But nothing had found him. He was still safe in his hiding place, trembling baldly, his limps aching with cold. For a moment he considered just staying here and going back to sleep, where he could ignore the cold and the hunger until they passed, but then a loud noise right above him made him jump and the moment was over.

With stiff limps he crawled out of his little cave into the tunnel. Right over his head, people were moving about, talking in hushed voices. They didn't sound so dangerous now, but Kyle didn't think about going up and exposing himself to them.

The weak, orange shine of the fire basins fell through the crates, blocked whenever someone cast their shadow down into the tunnel. Kyle looked up to see where the basin was. The shine promised warmth and maybe, if he was very lucky, some of it would fall down into the tunnel beneath. Above him he saw the soles of someone's feet and then a bearded face far above that, looking down. Kyle stared back, frozen in shock, but the man's gaze traveled on, to parts of the tunnel that contained nothing, and Kyle realized that he couldn't see him, shrouded in shadow as he was.

The man moved on, and so did the boy, trying hard not to make any noise as he moved through the labyrinth of tunnels towards the source of the light. There was a lower, smaller tunnel going in that direction, one that was not directly under the crate and offered a brief stretch of darkness, then Kyle emerged on the other side and found something he hadn't expected.

The intersection of tunnels before him was directly underneath the glowing basin. It was brighter on the fringes, but the basin itself was placed on a disk of solid metal that flooded the area directly underneath with shadow. It did not keep off all the warmth, though. Kyle could feel the first hint of it as he emerged into the light and his heart skipped a beat.

But the surprise waited for him in the shadow at the center. There were figures huddled inside, where it was dark and warm. Kyle could only make out their outlines at first, but it was obvious that they were human, and small. Children like him, only a little older and bigger. Still small enough to move down here without problem. They all turned to him and he saw two ghostly pale faces stare at him underneath long, messy hair, and a dark one that seemed to be little more in that shadow but a silhouette with eyes.

His first reaction, after the shock had passed, was joy. There were others like him here, hiding from the grown ups and the machines. He had seen kids working the day before and wondered if it were the same ones, wondered why they would hide down here, but didn't care much. He was no longer alone.

The other kids stared back at him, just as surprised as he was. The moment he started the move towards them, however, they started to make throwing movements in his direction. “Go away,” one of them hissed, and another voice, this one higher, like a girl's, snapped quietly, “Fuck off! This spot is taken!”

The last boy, the dark one, suddenly shot out of the shadow towards him and made him flinch back into the tunnel he'd come from. “You'll give us away, asshole!” he whispered angrily, and Kyle didn't really understand what he meant, but he got that he wasn't welcome here.

With tears in his eyes and even more frightened and lonely than before, he scurried back into the shadows.

  


-

  


The rest of the night passed much like the day had. Eventually all the people above him calmed down and it became quiet as they turned to their beds. The glowing basins remained active but people no longer surrounded them. Kyle didn't know why; he would much rather have slept beside that source of warmth than on a cold hard bed far from it. The machines had to be vehind that. Certainly, they didn't allow it, for whatever reason.

Halfway through the night, the gleam of the basins got weaker and finally stopped completely. Kyle cowered in the dark for a long time, his knees drawn to his chest, trying to find at least a little bit of warmth. It was completely silent now, except for the occasional cough somewhere in the camp. Everyone was sleeping, weren't they? Machines didn't sleep, but perhaps they weren't around when no one was up.

Maybe there was food up there. Kyle didn't know if the humans were fed in the evening. He was so hungry he was sick with it. If there was any food at all to be found here, it would be up there.

His limps were weak and trembling and he felt dizzy as he silently climbed up into the rows of beds, but by now his hunger was stronger than his fear.

Sneaking through the sleeping, exhausted people as quietly as he could, he finally made it to the containers that had held food at least once in the last day. They were still empty but now that he caught more than a fleeting glimpse, Kyle could see that they glistered with the residue of whatever they once contained. He took off his right glove and ran his finger along the inside of the big, long bowl, licking off what he had collected, but it was too little. It only made him more hungry. Desperate, he tried again, with the same result.

A heavy hand on his shoulder made him jump. It would have made him scream if he hadn't already learned how to suppress that reflex long ago. It was counter-productive to survival. But right now, it didn't seem to make any difference.

So he remained silent, and so did the man who stood behind him. A man, not a machine. He hadn't hurt Kyle yet. He didn't alert any of the others.

It was the bearded man from earlier. Was it? It was dark and almost all the men here were bearded. Kyle was still frozen but he was also waiting for the right time to run back to his hole and get away when the man leaned closer and put a finger to his lips, gesturing Kyle to be quiet. He moved away from the wide oped spare beyond the roof they were under to the back of the camp, near the fence, and the hand on Kyle's shoulder dragged him along. He went willingly, confused and unable to break free without causing noise.

They ended up close to the hole leading down to the tunnels. Kyle felt a little safer here, but he knew if the man didn't let him go he would have no chance to escape. And the hunger was making him dizzy. Maybe he didn't feel as afraid anymore because he was going to die anyway.

The man crouched down before him. He was really, really tall. Even crouching he seemed to tower over Kyle. “You're new,” he observed in a whisper. “Came with the delivery yesterday, no?” He suddenly let go of Kyle's shoulder, but before the boy could run he grabbed his arm instead and pushed up his sleeve. “No mark,” he observed. “Slipped away before they got you, huh? Thought so. Mighty small, you are. Would've sorted you out, squashed you to pudding with all the others.”

The words filled Kyle with horror, even though he didn't quite understand what the man was saying. He thought about Alyssa and wanted to cry but didn't dare to.

“Must be mighty hungry, huh?”

Kyle nodded wordlessly. Against all probability, he hoped that the man might have something to eat for him, but he offered nothing, and why would he, even if he'd had anything? Kyle had nothing to offer in return. So he was surprised when the guy put his hand to his shoulder again and drew him close until he could feel his foul breath on his face. “Feeding time starts just before dawn. You wait right here an' I'll get you some, huh? It's not long now. Can't have you starve all on your own. Or freeze.” He sat down and pulled Kyle into his lap. Like Alyssa had done on the ride here, but this was different and Kyle didn't like it. It was warmer, though. He still tried to wind out of the man's arms.

“Hey, shh.” The man's arms weren't letting him go. Not even holding him strongly but they were unmovable. He spoke softly. “You don't wanna starve, do you? I'll get you food. In the meantime, we can keep each other warm.”

Kyle stopped fighting. He didn't relax, but he knew he couldn't get away and that the man was right. It was better this way. He shouldn't _want_ to get away and he didn't know why he did. He just knew, as the man pulled him closer while murmuring softly in his ear, that he didn't feel safe here. Not like he had with Alyssa. He knew, because life and his parents had taught him, that no one ever offered anything without wanting something in return, and Kyle didn't know what this man might get out of giving him food.

He didn't think about the other children hiding underneath the crates. That was a connection he didn't make until later.

  


-

  


The cold formed little clouds in front of John's face as he walked down the street towards Santa Fe. The ruins were looming not far from him, gray against the gray sky and appearing incomplete even from the outside. John hadn't been here before, but he knew that only the very rim of the city still existed. Everything more than half a mile towards the former center had been blasted away.

He carried a weapon, but it wasn't a very strong one. Replaceable. Not carrying a weapon would have been suspicious, but this one would be lost if his plan actually worked. He carried a backpack that was mostly empty and a ratty, thorn blanket that wouldn't be missed much. Beside him, Hernandez was carrying similar equipment. To any fleeting glance they would look like nomads who had just happened to wander into this area.

John didn't know if the ruse was really necessary for the machines. Chances were the Collectors, as they'd come to be known, were simply programmed to capture any human being they came across more or less alive and wouldn't care or notice if they didn't seem to belong there.

About unfriendly humans who might lurk in the ruins, John didn't worry at all. This place was empty; it had nothing to offer and was swarming with machines. No one would come here if they had a choice. It was one of the reasons why they neared the city in plain view. They wanted the machines to pick up on their presence, otherwise it might be days before they got anywhere, and they didn't have the supplies for that.

They had separated from their team a few hours ago, well away from the city. Had taken a car halfway there, then left it behind, not willing to sacrifice the precious vehicle and the fuel it carried. John hadn't been able to talk Hernandez out of coming with him. If it worked, his old friend had argued, it would work better with two experienced fighters inside the camp rather than just one. If it didn't work... well, then they were all screwed anyway.

Now, in the vastness of the wasteland and hearing the distant hum of engines coming closer, John had to admit he was glad his friend was with him. He just hoped that it was not a decision Hernandez would have to pay for dearly.

As they turned and watched the bulky machine move towards them, Hernandez seemed to think along similar lines. “Told you this was a stupid idea, Boss.”

He'd been calling John Boss since they'd first met when John had been twelve. The first few times it had been a joke.

“Noted. If it turns out you were right and we get violently murdered, I'll promote you.”

“To what?”

“I'll make something up just for you.”

“Well, do it quickly. Here they come.”

And they did. The Collector was enormous up close, and it got ever closer as it rolled towards them without any indication of slowing down. John lifted his hands to indicate surrender, but the thing never indicated a willingness to fire. More a willingness to run them over. It stopped very close to them and John thought that any of his men watching from the distance were now having a heart attack. Fortunately, they didn't start firing prematurely. That would have ruined his day.

But his men were very far away. They probably couldn't have done anything even if they'd wanted to. It was one reason why this plan had so few fans.

Everyone would have been a lot less nervous if it wasn't John here. He hated the fact that they would have been so much more willing to sacrifice the life of anyone else, while at the same time he wondered if he'd made a mistake by creating a situation where the nerves were so raw.

But no. He trusted his men. They knew what they were doing.

He wasn't entirely sure what he was doing, though. Surrendering to a machine had never been something he'd considered until a few weeks ago. Now he stood here with his hands in the air and waited for the machine to act.

The net that shot out grabbing him came as a surprise. John had known it would come but hadn't expected it to hit so hard or so fast. The thing was made of steel and the impact rattled him. Beside him Hernandez cursed in his own net as he was lifted towards the top of the wagon.

What followed felt a lot like a long drop through darkness, but it was in fact a fast lowering while something John couldn't see felt over his body and cut off his backpack, took his gun. The net made it impossible for him to fight back even if he had wanted to. Only the last meter or so was actually a fall, when the net suddenly opened and dropped him onto the hard ground.

The sound of impact and an “Ouf” beside him told him that Hernandez was right there with him.

“Alright,” he muttered. “That went well.”

  


-

  


The ride took about another hour by John's estimation. They weren't the only ones in the wagon; fifteen others were in the darkness with them, most of them from a small underground settlement of scavengers who had thought to be far enough from the city to be of no interest to the machines. Some of their friends and family had managed to escape, or so they hoped. They knew some had been killed. One was injured: a broken arm. Even as John tried to splint it with what little they had and almost no light, he knew that the man wouldn't live much longer. Their plan to free the camp required them to get into it and make contact with the inmates. There was no way to start before the selection took place that would sort out this man, as well as the woman who couldn't stop coughing and the teen who was close to starvation and probably wouldn't have lived through the day even if the machine hadn't found him.

John wondered if them knew. No one spoke much; not knowing if the Collector was listening, John and Hernandez mentioned nothing of their plan.

No more prisoners were added before they reached the camp. John and his friend had been picked up on the way back there. When the doors opened and they stepped outside, John saw the others for the first time and was shocked by their general state. He hadn't known things were so bad out here.

They had to drag the dying teen with them because he couldn't stand on his own, and that seemed almost cruel. A machine with a weapon demanded that they move, toward the gate in the inner fence where the selection would happen, but one of the women, the one with the cough, stood and stared at it for a long time with a pale and unreadable face, before she turned her head to look at John. “My name is Ginny,” she told him.

 _'She knows,'_ he thought, suddenly incapable to keep his emotional distance from these people. Solemnly, he put his hand on her shoulder, and said quietly, “I'll remember it.”

The whole thing didn't take long after that. At the gate, every single one of them was scanned and then send either to the left or to the right. Only John, Hernandez, and two of the others went right: a man with a wild beard that made his age impossible to guess, and a small but tough looking woman in her fifties. All the others were led behind a steel gate by a machine walking on the parody of legs and disappeared when it closed. John thought he saw Ginny looking at him at the last moment but he wasn't sure.

Next were the bar codes that got burned into their arms. John had known about it, but he hadn't expected, somehow, how much it would hurt. He had been shot once and while he couldn't say this wars worse, the smell of burned skin combined with the mechanical cruelty behind the act hit him unexpectedly hard. He clutched his arm to his chest afterward, gritting his teeth, and while Hernandez seemed to sense his mood John knew that he could never explain the helpless rage that he felt in that moment.

There was no time for them to get over the pain. The four of them were ushered through yet another gate and found themselves among a group of haggard looking people wandering towards the container-like barracks at the other end of the camp. The sun was setting behind those clouds promising snow and the day's work was over. They looked at the newcomers as they wordlessly joined them; some with mild curiosity, some with something like pity. Most didn't show any emotion at all.

At least, John thought as he joined the others slinging down the pale sludge the machines fed them with, he didn't have to worry about food for once. He didn't know what this was and decided that he was better off not knowing. The man and the woman who'd arrived with him and Hernandez ate as if they hadn't seen food in a week and didn't seem to care what it was as long as it kept them alive.

John ate with less enthusiasm, but he ate, knowing it would be a few days at the very least until they could get out of here. After dinner, when everyone else curled up on the hard bunks, John and Hernandez wandered around, exploring as much of the premises as possible. It wasn't much. Their movements were limited to the living area and eventually a hissing voice from one of the bunks told them to lie the fuck down or get their asses shot.

There were enough empty beds, even inside the containers. With the spare accommodations outside, the camp could house about two hundred people but at the moment only about seventy were here. Once it had been close to full, but more people had died or been killed than had been found to replace them.

John spend the night sleepless and cold, for the first time really appreciating the comfort and safety the bunkers gave them. Even camping out in the ruins during missions had been a lot better than this, because there he was surrounded by people who watched his back and armed to the teeth. Here he was surrounded by enemies, cut off from any friend, and even with a plan he felt exposed and vulnerable.

The sky brightened slowly. John and his soldiers mostly operated at night because the darkness offered protection. He missed even the pale light of these days, but now the rising sun filled him with a vague sense of dread.

Well. No one had said it would be easy.

They received another meal at dawn. It wasn't much, but at least there was regularity to it, which was more than most people had in regard to food these days. John was still hungry when they were send to work with the silent promise that anyone falling short of the demands would be shot.

“Last few days have been quiet,” a voice beside him suddenly said as John neared the center of the camp where piles of things he couldn't identify from the distance were waiting under flat roofs. “Not many bodies brought in, which was nice. Had us do other stuff then, you'll see in a moment. Guess you get the easy beginner's guide, General.”

John froze. If anyone learned who he was too soon, if the machines found out, all would be lost. He turned and looked into a hollow-eyed, bearded face he only recognized after a few seconds. “Jackson?” he whispered, incredulous.

“Yeah. I mean, yes, Sir. Didn't desert the army, in case you were wondering.”

“We didn't. We thought you were dead.”

“Wish I was.” Jackson bit his lips as if he regretted saying that and stretched his back in an attempt to walk a little straighter. “We were ambushed, most of the unit were killed. I got away with Sergeant Martinez, but one of those damn collectors got us before we made it to the next hideout. She was injured, so she got sorted out.” His face gave away nothing. It had been two years. “Sorry they got you, too,” he eventually added, his voice flat.

“Don't be sorry. Care to rejoin the army?”

Jackson gave him a long look. “You know,” he finally said. “I was pretty shocked when I saw you and Hernandez here.”

“Good thing you kept that to yourself.” John kept his voice very low. “You remember that plan we had, about freeing the camps? This is your chance to find out if it'll work.”

Jackson looked thoughtful. His gaze went to a far distance, but for the first time there was life in it. “What do you need me to do, Sir?”

John explained the plan roughly as Jackson led him to the piles under the roofs. One of them turned out to be old and broken electronic equipment: VCRs, microwaves, radios, televisions, what looked like parts of cars. They were to take them apart and divide them by their components. Even knowing this would all come to an end soon, John hated the idea of helping the fucking machines one bit. Still, looking at the other piles of clothes and shoes, he thought it could have been worse.

In the next few days he and Hernandez and now Jackson would inform the other inmates of the planned break. They would improvise weapons out of the stuff lying around here. They wouldn't be great, but for what they needed, a sturdy club would suffice. Once John gave the team watching from the observation point outside the signal, an EMP would be fired that would fry the higher systems for a few minutes. Long enough for the inmates to disable the guard bots and keep them from shooting everyone. Not long enough to get rid of the turrets that had proved sadly resistant to EMPs in the past, but those would be focused on the attack coming from the outside at the same time.

And then the Outside would provide them with weapons and everything would be very violent for a while. John and the others expected HKs from the area to be called to the camp. It wouldn't be pretty. And many would be injured or killed.

There weren't as many in here as John had hoped to save. But he was still determined to save them.

His determination mixed with anger and sadness around noon, when Hernandez and three others pushed a wagon past them loaded with the dead bodies of the people they had arrived with. John couldn't see Ginny, but he knew she was somewhere in there. He saw the teenager.

Another two joined him and Jackson in their less grim task and after testing the waters for a while, John started talking, in a low voice, about their escape. The eyes of the woman lit up and she asked questions and stood a little straighter when the talk was over, but the man remained closed off and distant, refusing to hope. He had the sunken, empty eyes of someone who'd been in here for too long and the body of a once strong man worn down to nothing. John learned that he'd been one of the first to be imprisoned in this camp and that, at this point, he was just waiting for the machines to kill him and be done with it.

“You want to die?” the woman challenged. “Might as well go down fighting.” Which was a good argument but it was harder than that to kindle a flame that had long gone to ash. John had hope, though. At least the man didn't rattle them out.

He would talk to the others in the evening, when they were fed. His hands continued their work automatically (like a machine) as his eyes traveled to the pit where Hernandez and the others where throwing now naked bodies onto other naked bodies, and further, beyond the fence and the ruins of the city. Not far from here was a factory that swarmed the entire ares with killer bots. When the attack on the camp started, those bots would be mobilized to come here. Except at the same time, another attack would start on the factory.

Many of his men saw that attack as the more important part of this mission. John didn't agree. It would do a lot of damage to the control of the machines in this area and might win it for the humans for good, but he couldn't stand between these haggard, abused people forced into horrible labor every day and not make them his priority.

Years ago, they had tried to get messages into the camps, to get the inmates to hang on. One way had been the illumination of the clouds at night with strong lights, blinking in morse code, hoping someone in there would be able to read it and pass it on. To this day, John didn't know if anyone had received that message. It had been a promise they had needed to put on hold for five years.

Now he knew he was going to keep it.


	7. 2015 - 1/2

When she had been very young, before her brother was born, Kate Brewster had lived in Phoenix for a short year with her family. They had lived in a suburban area with many trees and in the foggy memories she retained of the time, Kate had used to idealize the place. Growing up she had often talked about how she would live in Arizona when she was older because it was so much better than any other place they happened to be in at the time.

Now she was older and had to admit that Arizona was pretty much the same as everywhere else. Her precious childhood memories didn't stand a chance against several nuclear explosions.

It had taken them a long time to even get here. When they finally, after several years, left Albuquerque, they had zigzagged across the state until finally settling in Tucson. The tracks had been nerve-wrecking, even more so than usual. They'd only traveled at night, had had to split up often because certain roads were not passable for the heavier vehicles, had lost several cars and people to attacks. For weeks they had lived in the seats of their transports, never really resting. It had been hardest on Jeannie, the only young child to make the journey, and Kate had had to muffle her sobs more than once so they couldn't give them away.

Many had argued that Kate shouldn't have made the trip herself, should have come after them later, but she had insisted. Had she known that they would lose so much time on the way to Phoenix, she wouldn't have. Instead of making it to the base there in time, she gave birth to Louisa in the basement of a half-collapsed shopping mall fifty miles from their destination, in the summer of 2013, biting a piece of wood and hoping that none of the soldiers surrounding her would lose their nerve and strangle her or the baby to keep them quiet. It had been among the most horrible moments of her life.

Louisa had been born with healthy lungs. Even though the basement kept in the sound, it seemed that every solider in that group instantly hated her.

Kate could deal with it as long as they didn't hurt her. She'd just wanted to move on and get her kids and everyone else to safety. Jeanette, however, had seemed to grow up several years the moment her baby sister was born. There was no more crying from her. Instead, she became fiercely protective of the helpless baby and constantly made sure that she had everything she needed, even as she kept telling her how important it was to be quiet.

They hadn't stayed in Phoenix in the end. By the time they made it there, the base was a smoldering pit of rubble and they found only corpses. Six weeks later they reached Tucson and there they had been staying ever since.

Getting comfortable. Watching and learning their environment like they had Albuquerque. Preparing to take the next step.

And now the next step was nearly upon them. And they weren't ready.

White fog formed in front of Kate's face as she stepped out into the fading daylight. Gray, endless clouds above her. She hadn't seen they sky in many years.

It was February, almost March. A good month to be frigging cold. Just not necessarily in Arizona.

It was February the 28th, Kate suddenly realized. John turned thirty today. Well, John wasn't here.

“I'm against this,” Corporal Houser muttered, for the thirteenth time.

“Yeah, you made that clear.”

“You don't have to come if you don't want to,” Liz argued. Her lined face seemed to be stuck in a perpetual frown as her eyes traveled over the landscape, looking for any potential danger. The area this close to the base should be clear, but it paid to be cautious anyway. And no one was more cautious than Major Lizbeth Kowalski. It showed in the fact that she was still alive to see her hair turn from black to silver and in the fact that most of the soldiers she commanded were still alive, too.

Kate had come to respect the older woman a great deal and was glad that she was with them now. For as much as Kate was used to living in this world, and as determined as she was to do what she was about to do, she had little to no experience actually venturing out into enemy-controlled territory and the rifle was an unfamiliar weight on her back.

She normally only carried a weapon during the transfer from one base to the next, and even then the machines rarely came close enough for her to use it.

“If I you are determined to see this through, I figure I might as well come and minimize the risk of it ending in total disaster,” Sven Houser explained. “Besides, I was ordered to come.”

“Lame excuse,” Wilkins commented. Kate ignored them, her attention focused on the task that lay ahead, but the easy banter going on around her helped her relax a little. These were all experienced soldiers who had learned to rely on each other and knew what they were doing – even the ones still in their teens. Kate hoped that she wasn't leading them to their death and wondered if John still felt like this every fucking time.

They manned the open jeep and started the drive towards the city. The guards they passed looked confused but let them go. Kate had, of course, authority to go wherever the fuck she wanted.

“The general isn't gonna like this,” Liz said quietly after they left the secure zone behind. The city was almost invisible in the darkness ahead, but Kate could see the lights of an aerial hunter killer searching through the ruins in great distance.

Great distance that was getting smaller.

“The general isn't here, and he isn't the boss of me.”

“Well, he is mine.”

“And so am I,” Kate pointed out, knowing full well that is wasn't that simple. “I take full responsibility for this.”

“I don't doubt that, and I'm not worried about that,” Liz assured her. “Just wanted to point out that it's hard to take responsibility when you're dead.”

She moved away and Kate was left to ponder that comment which, by way of argumentation, wasn't so bad. Yes, there was a big chance that Kate would die, but she didn't think the small group of soldiers accompanying her would be facing repercussions for that, especially since in that case most of them would die, too. Kate knew the risk but had decided that the benefits of the mission's success were worth it, and she wasn't going to change her mind just because now it was happening she was very scared and couldn't stop thinking about John and her daughters.

If she died now, Louisa wouldn't remember her face. But there were plenty of other people to raise them in her place, John one of them, and Kate found comfort in that knowledge. She thought about John's mother, Sarah, who had been thrown into a situation not entirely unlike Kate's after having been used to comfort and safety much longer than Kate had been. Sarah had been all alone, and then she had been all alone with a fatherless child completely dependent on her and her alone. And she'd still overcome her fears and fought against seemingly untouchable enemies on the risk of her son losing his only remaining parent, because the goal she tried to reach was worth it.

It was all the sadder that she hadn't accomplished it, or Kate wouldn't be here now, riding a jeep full of soldiers towards the ruins of a city that had been eradicated in an instant.

“Worried?” Wilkins asked, sitting down on the bench beside Kate, her eyes never leaving the ruins for long. She was at least ten years younger than Kate but so much more experienced in battle.

“No,” Kate lied. “I was just thinking about Sarah Connor, for some reason.”

“Ah.” A smile appeared on the young woman's lips, as if the mere mention of the name was explanation enough. Kate knew that a lot of the soldiers admired John's mother deeply just based on the stories he'd told them about her. She was an inspiration to so many, and Kate wondered, never having met the woman, how she would have felt about the fact that a lot of kids were joining John's army to follow her example of fighting the machines. From all she could tell, Sarah would have approved. Or maybe it would have broken her heart. Maybe both. That was how John felt about it, anyway.

He'd never told Kate how he felt about his mother being turned into a legend and used to support a point, or the fact that he was the one instigating that.

She just knew that the admiration for this long-dead woman was strong enough that one day someone would volunteer to go on a one-way trip through time to protect her. Sometimes Kate wondered if she had met that particular soldier yet. If he was here with her right now. She looked at the group she was with and couldn't imagine it. How would she feel about it, knowing how it would end? Somehow, it was different than sending their men on missions they knew would likely get some killed, like Kate did now. How did John feel about it?

Had he really told her the truth when he said he didn't know the man's identity?

All Kate knew was that it would be a man, because John told her that much, and that he would be their age or older, because logic dictated that. She knew he would volunteer, but considering how popular John's mother was in his army, she couldn't imagine he'd be the only one. So the choice would fall, because that was the only logical way for it to go, on someone experienced who remembered the world before the war and knew how to handle it. Someone born afterward would only be overwhelmed and distracted by so much life and a culture they didn't understand and wouldn't fit in with.

It was some comfort, at least. They wouldn't send a fucking child. It would be someone who'd already lived a life, and who would get the chance to see the world as it had been one more time before the end. Although Kate wasn't sure if the latter would be a blessing or a curse.

It didn't matter now. She pushed the thoughts away and concentrated on her surroundings as they entered the ruins. Their destination was still a few miles away and Liz had determined that they would leave the jeep behind with about half a mile to go because the noise of the engine would attract too much attention. On foot they would be slower, and they only had a limited amount of time to get their job done.

The further they went into town, the slower they drove. Everyone was tense. This was largely uncharted territory. Owing to the closeness of the local extermination camp and the corresponding number of machines in the area, this part of town had never been looted. Probably. Chances were that the destruction in a wide areal around this place had been so great that hardly any survivor had ever found their way here before the machines showed up. If they were wrong about this, their mission would be a waste of time, resources, and lives.

But an even great number of lives would be lost if they didn't even try, so it was pretty much a no-brainer.

The problem was that John and most of his troops were gone to liberate yet another camp – the third altogether, after the one in Santa Fe and on up in South Dakota that had been taken care of by the branch of the army stationed in the North. Another attempt, in Topeka, had failed, ending in the almost complete eradication of the attacking units. Arizona was only the second attempt made by John himself. This time it wasn't him who got voluntarily captured and incarcerated, and for that Kate was grateful. The ten days he had been gone last time had been among the longest of her life, as they could easily have been turned into ten years.

Except that camp wouldn't have existed for another ten years. Probably not even for another month, as it had been rapidly running out of humans to murder and get rid of.

Back then they brought back fifty-one freed prisoners, losing fifty-seven soldiers in the attack. The balance had been almost even. (It had begun to feel a lot less balanced when it turned out in the months that followed that some of the freed inmates were too damaged to contribute much to their struggling society and some voices started to call for their banishment, arguing that they only took up space and resources and their night terrors got everyone down in a place where night terrors were common.) This time, the camp they were going for was still very active, and there were over two hundred prisoners in there. Kate knew there would be countess injured even if the attack was a success, but more importantly, she knew now what state most of the prisoners would be in when they arrived at the base. Simple bandages weren't going to cut it.

And even of those they wouldn't have enough.

So here she was, on her way to raid an old hospital, hoping to still find the medical supplies in it that would be so desperately needed so very soon. If all went well. If anyone came back at all.

The attack on the camp would begin soon. That would be their chance, as the machines guarding this area would likely be called off, and if they were very lucky they would never return. Kate tightened her grip on the gun she hated but was skilled with, and waited for the right moment.

  


-

  


It had stopped snowing a few weeks ago. The phases of daylight were longer now, and with them grew the length of the phases of work. The raise in temperature wasn't enough to make the days comfortable, but fewer people froze to death in summer. Only when the nights were particularly cold and someone was left outside the shelter without protection. Sometimes they found naked bodies out there but often they couldn't tell if their clothes had been taken before or after they died.

No one ever checked for a cause of death. People died. Sometimes people were killed. Sometimes it was not the machines that killed them. In the end, the bodies being already stripped just saved work before they went down into the hole.

In the years since Kyle's arrival, countless bodies had gone down there, yet the hole never seemed to fill up. Every now and again, a machine would reach down with a giant claw and bull out bulks of corpses, their arms and legs sticking everywhere. It happened that parts broke off and fell back onto the pile of bodies below. Kyle watched it happen now, on the other end of the deep cavity. The bodies were loaded into a box behind a wall the inmates never crossed, and he didn't know what happened to them. He didn't want to know, because he thought about it a lot and didn't like a single of the possible answers.

He watched, but did not stop his work as he did so, never letting himself be distracted enough to make a mistake. It didn't pay to draw attention to himself. His stomach turned when he heard the whirr of a passing machine, as it always did, but it didn't stop, and Kyle pretended not to have noticed, just turned around to take the next body off the wagon behind him.

The man he was working with didn't stop glaring at him. Kyle pretended not to notice that either. He didn't know what he had done to anger the guy. They didn't talk. Kyle was fairly certain that they had never interacted before, As far as he knew, the man had arrived with the last transport, the one that came before all these new dead bodies had been delivered. Maybe he hated Kyle just for being a part of this place.

Kyle kept working. The man wouldn't touch him, not now when a machine was so close by. Who caused trouble was shot. Who got hurt was shot. If the man attacked him Kyle would fight back, so the man wouldn't attack him. Except the man was tall and strong and Kyle was small and weak and, like the other kids, didn't have much of a chance to hurt anyone and that was why they were allowed to live in the first place. Kyle hoped this man didn't know that yet. Or maybe he didn't care if the machines killed him. Many of the new ones got themselves shot in the early days.

Kyle had thought about it himself more than once. There was nothing to live for here. He hated this existence, the things he had to do and see and that were done to him. Being alive wasn't worth this. But in the long months he spend hiding in the tunnels, he had also been afraid – the fear of the machines had seeped into his bones from the day he was born, until he was saturated with it. He hadn't been able to fight it enough to get out and let them see him, a too-small kid in a camp that had no use for those too small and weak to work. Any chance to reduce the hunger pains had kept him from starving to death. Something had always kept him going, hiding from anyone he _could_ hide from, for years.

It had only been this winter when he finally reached the point where he stopped caring. His body, while small and skinny, had grown to the point where the best hiding places – the ones accessible only to him – became too small to fit into. His already terrible existence got even worse, or maybe he just ran out of strength. One day, when the others were woken for their morning meal, he climbed out of the tunnel and walked on shaky legs among them, in plain view of the machines guarding them. The hunger and exhaustion were too great and had pushed him into a place somewhere beyond fear. He didn't care if he was shot and ended up in that hole with all the frozen, broken bodies. He only thought about how he wanted to eat something before they caught and killed him.

He'd thought about his parents a lot those days. About Alyssa, too, whose brief display of kindness had left such a lasting impression in this bleak world. Mostly, though, he had been numb. Spend. He'd been seven years old with nothing left to give.

He'd made it to the food and managed to grab some before he could be driven off. Not much, but enough to make the pain fade just that much. Then he had sat there and waited for the end, too exhausted to go back into hiding, repeat this game for another day. Maybe a little disappointed to be sill alive. He didn't have the energy to decide what to do now so he did nothing, knowing that the first machine that saw him would take him out.

He'd sat there while everyone else got up to work. If anyone paid him any mind, he didn't notice. Time moved and the crowd moved away and he had kind of drifted until suddenly a strong hand grabbed his shoulder and roughly pulled him to his feet. Kyle had felt shock but no fear in the seconds he'd thought it was a machine taking him to his execution. It turned into confusion when he saw it was a man, dragging him along in the line moving towards the work stations.

“You don't work, you get killed, Kid,” he'd growled, not even looking at Kyle. “So pull yourself together.”

Those remained the only words he ever said to Kyle, who lost sight of him just moments later but let the momentum carry him along and the machines spotted him and didn't care. Kyle did the works he was tasked with, mechanically, like he was a machine himself, and all day he waited to be pulled out and killed but all day he was ignored. In the evening he returned to the containers with the others, ate with the others, and hid in the tunnels again. The next day he repeated that. And the next. And the next.

There was no official place for him to sleep. He was not registered in the camp, like all the ones with a bar code burned into their skin. To the machines he didn't exist. But as long as he worked the machines didn't pay attention to him. He came out to eat and the meager but regular meals gave him back some of his strength. And with that returned the fear. And the fear kept him going.

Often, he wished he could go back to the time when he didn't care.

Like now, when that man he had never met kept staring at him like he hated him, like all of this was somehow Kyle's fault. Together they pulled the next body from the cart: a woman, bloated, rotting. Must have been dead a while before being found. It was no longer freezing all the time (just most of the time), and that meant the bodies got worse. Kyle held his breath and tried not to look, and not to feel the flesh come loose under his grip. He suppressed the urge to retch. He suppressed everything.

The body was heavy to him but his partner was still strong. Maybe he hated Kyle because he wasn't enough of a help. Together they got the body to the pit and dropped it in.

Kyle's arms were aching. They always were. He was out of breath and a little dizzy. Like always. His head hurt. He was thirsty. He reached for the next corpse.

The man at his side kept doing his part without trying to murder him even once. Hateful stares were all he threw at Kyle until the cart was empty but Kyle remained wary even after they were done. Out of the corner of his eye, he sometimes saw the man rub his arm, where the bar code had been burned into mere days ago. Maybe he hated Kyle because he didn't have one, but there was no way he could see that through all the clothes. And not having one only meant that Kyle was going to die if ever he was caught in one of the machines' sporadic controls.

Perhaps that was what he was jealous about.

Kyle tried not to think about it. He tried not to think about anything all the time but it never worked. So he tried to at least get a grip on what he was thinking about and make it useful. He concentrated on his work, took in his surroundings, the way the people moved, what their movement indicated they were going to do. Making out potential threats. Finding the next task to work on. If he got over to the pile of garbage from the wasteland before any of the machines noted he and his partner were done with their cart, he wouldn't be assigned a new task by them and might escape having to work with any more dead bodies today.

Garbage was good. It gave him something to focus on that was neither dead nor fear or despair. Sometimes he found something in it that made him think of Mom or Dad, but now, after almost three years in here, he had learned how to push those thoughts away so well that it happened automatically. His parents had become a vague fact that existed somewhere in the back of his mind and that was where they had to stay if he were to get through the day, and the next, and any other. That was where everything had to stay that was not explicitly useful.

There were memories, experiences, that led to despair, but they also needed to be examined in order to learn and avoid mistakes. Kyle had trained himself to separate the facts from the emotions, examine the first and lock the latter away. (He locked his emotions away because he never learned how to murder them for good.) By now, he even managed to brush off his nightmares in a matter of seconds. (Wake up. Check the surroundings. Plan the next step. Take action. Don't linger.)

The next charts were nearing his position. If he stayed any longer, he would be forced to empty another one. Kyle found a group moving in the right direction and made to walk after them as if he belonged with them and then duck away to the garbage piles when the opportunity arose. A movement at the northern end of he pit caught his attention and distracted him for precious seconds. A figure – with the rags and the hood it was hard to tell but he thought it was a woman – lost her footing on the edge of the pit while shoving a body over it and fell, her brief shriek of surprise and panic cutting through the air. Kyle saw her go over with his stomach seeming to twist inside him. This was a recurring nightmare of his. Every time he dragged a body to that edge he feared he might fall, too. Now it seemed like the moment was frozen in time, like the woman was going to her inevitable doom forever.

He had seen it happen once before, months ago. A man had fallen and then he'd lain there, unmoving, on top of the bodies. He stood out because he wore clothes, and for many days, Kyle's gaze had been drawn to him every time he stood at the edge. He'd wished the man would finally be buried under other bodies, but somehow, they never fell right and Kyle had continued to see him, the one dead body in there that had a face, that used to be a real person. In the end he had been buried by snow.

This woman was not as lucky. Kyle's heart jumped when he saw her get back up after her fall, struggling to gain her balance on top of all the copses. First there was something like joy, perhaps, at the fact that she lived, but it turned to unease soon enough when she started clawing at the steep walls and it became obvious that there was no way out of that hole for her.

Kyle tore away from the sight, more eager to get away than ever. But his window of opportunity had closed in the moment of distraction and a woman, dirty but young under her rags, wordlessly gestured him to help her unload her cart. He didn't protest, but he kept his back to the pit and wished he could block out the faint calls for help that reached them from the distance.

His new partner didn't look that way either. Every now and again their eyes would meet and then they would both look away again. They worked in silence until the cart was empty and Kyle finally slipped away from the dead and the horrible edge and the cries of desperation.

That evening, when work ended, he was worn down not only by the labor of the day. He was always tired, always exhausted despite the time of day, just like he was always hungry, but this night he felt so drained that he thought about just slipping into his latest hiding place underneath without even bothering with food. He knew that was the first step towards dying, had seen it in others often enough, but it was harder than usual not to take it.

In the end he stayed, but he kept to the fringes of the shelter and got even less food than usual. It was still better than nothing. He wanted to get out before anyone could notice him, but raised voices attracted his attention just as he turned to sneak off.

It was not the usual hissed fight for food or against unwanted attention bestowed on someone strong enough to fight back and therefore untouchable. It sounded like a discussion. Several voices joining and arguing. A long buried memory was dragged up from the places Kyle never visited anymore, of his parents talking in almost the same tone of voice, the day before they tried to leave the city. His first instinct was to curl up and press his hands over his ears and block out the sound until he didn't have to think of them anymore, but some of the words he caught made him stick around instead, edging closer until he could understand what those men and women were talking about.

“Rumors aren't going to help anyone,” was the first full sentence he made out. Spoken by a woman's voice, vaguely familiar and full of anger, and followed by “Fuck off, man!”

“It's not a rumor, it's a fact. It happened, it's still happening.” A man's voice. Kyle didn't know this one. He tried to see but caught only a brief glimpse of a group standing in a circle. All the other people listening in were blocking his view.

“Even if it did, that's far away and of no fucking use to us.” Another male voice, and this one Kyle recognized. It made him retreat a few steps, almost run, but he wanted to know more now and the man's mind was on something else anyway. Kyle wished he could see more but didn't dare get any closer, where too many people would make it hard to run.

A movement caught his eye and he saw a dark shape, barely visible on top of one of the bunk beds. Kyle had to stare for a second before he recognized a boy, a few years older than him, sitting up there, watching the commotion. It was the dark skinned one he had seen hiding in the tunnels on his first day in the camp and many times after that from a distance. Kyle recognized him by the dark gray jacket and the matching cap he was wearing, a mass of dark curls sticking out underneath it.

After a moment's hesitation, he quickly moved over to the bed and climbed up. He would have chosen another one but this one was the only close enough and at the right angle. He felt anxious, was ready to bolt, but this time, the boy didn't try to chase him off. He just watched as Kyle nimbly climbed up the frame and even scooted over to make room.

Together they watched the scene beneath them. Five people were in an animated discussion, and one of them, the one who had all the attention, was the guy Kyle had had to work with today. The one who'd seemed to hate him. The way he stood there now, the way he sounded, it seemed he hated everyone.

“If it happened elsewhere, it can happen here,” he insisted right now.

“You keep telling yourself that,” the woman from earlier said, but another woman, an older one by the name of Clara who had once tried to steal Kyle's blanket during a particularly cold night, backed the man up. “Let him talk,” she snapped. “If there is any chance that someone will save us, I wanna hear all about it.”

Kyle's hands gripped the edge of the board he was lying on. He threw a quick glance at the boy beside him and the boy nodded vaguely as if confirming what Kyle just heard, having caught more of the conversation earlier.

“Heard from guys in New Mexico who made it here last year,” the man said. He stood a little straighter and glared at all the ohers. “They say Connor and his army have attacked the camp there, freed everyone.”

“Connor,” the first woman spat, as if that that name held all the evil in the world.

“That's far away,” one of the men, a tall one with a scar on his face who had been around forever, argued.

“But it's been going on for years. Hear it from others. Camps are being freed everywhere. Sooner or later Connor's gonna come for us.”

“Like Father Christmas?” the woman who was not Clara asked. “What has that guy ever done for us? They are sitting in their bunkers, playing war, and we all have to pay the price for it.”

“It's so far away, I can't imagine anything they do has any effect on what happens to us,” the one with the scar pointed out.

“Then it won't do us any fucking good either, will it?” the woman spat, and Clara hissed, “Will you all fucking keep it down? They'll hear you!”

“They don't hear anything,” the third man, a bearded red-head named Carl, claimed. “And if they do, they won't care.”

“Why would they, anyway?” the Not-Clara spat. “It's not like it has any meaning.”

But Kyle looked over to the other boy and the boy looked at him and something passed between them that moment. Some unspoken understanding that there was hope where there had been none before. Just a vague acknowledgment of an undefined possibility. But it was more than nothing.

  


-

  


In the end it played out. They got the medication and other supplies that they had had such an urgent need for. Several people would not have to die because of the team's brave foray to the formerly unreachable hospital, and that meant it had been worth it.

It had been worth it. Kate just needed to remember that.

Liz Kowalski was dead. Kate had known that fatalities were likely, had even been aware she might not make it herself, but somehow she had not seen this coming.

Corporal Houser had been shot, but he was still upright when they made it back. Wordlessly he climbed from the truck, taking one of the bags with his good arm, and with a last glare in Kate's direction he disappeared underground. Wilkins followed after him, subdued but not hostile. She waited for Kate and they carried the bigger bag down the stairs together.

They'd made it back just in the nick of time, it turned out. Word reached her that the attack on the camp had been successful and that John and his men were now on their way back with the freed inmates and a lot of injured, ETA one day. She hurried to medical to set up everything, only to find that Li and Hannah had done a good job in her absence. The medication they had gotten needed to be categorized and the young members of her team who had never dealt with some of the drugs she'd retrieved needed to be instructed in their use, else they might accidentally kill someone with them and that would defeat the purpose.

She'd deal with Liz' death later. Right now, she simply didn't have the time.

Henry awaited her with the list of things that needed to be done. Most of them had been crossed off already. He'd been working on this almost independently since before her trip; even now he was only reporting his progress, not asking her for input. Kate was glad that this was one thing she could leave to someone else.

As she watched him limp away on his coarse artificial foot she reminded herself to keep some of the painkillers back for him, already knowing that they would probably end up going to someone else anyway.

Even with her team working effectively, there was little time to get everything done, yet they managed it with a few hours to spare. The final hours of the night before John and the others were to arrive, Kate retreated to their room and allowed herself some sleep in her bed, rather than taking a few nabs in quiet corners whenever she got the chance as she had for days, even before she left on that jeep. For what came next she would need all the strength she could spare, if past experiences were anything to go by.

She dropped on the bed and was almost gone when movement in the room rose her to a state of semi-alertness. Through half-open eyes she saw her kids, who had been asleep in their corner when she came in, wander over to her, with Jeanette leading Louisa by the hand and finally lifting the toddler onto the bed. Without saying a word the two little girls snuggled up to their mother and Kate just wrapped her arms around them and held hem close as she drifted off to sleep.

It was a moment of comfort that ended all too soon when someone knocked on their door a few hours later to inform Kate that John was back.

She didn't waste time getting ready, having slept in her clothes anyway. All she did take the time for was wrap her sleepy girls in the blanket and kiss their foreheads, wishing, as she left the room, that she could have been the mother she'd wanted to be when she'd been a little girl herself. Then the door closed behind her and her mind was only on the tasks that lay ahead.

The bunker was already steaming with people. Soldiers everywhere, and unknown civilians being settled into the spaces that had been cleared for them, being taken care of by anyone with a hand to spare. They looked pitiful: thin to skeletal, dirty, hollow-eyed. Carrying themselves with wariness towards anyone and everyone, and who didn't look numb and distant looked angry, except for a few who just looked around in wonder like they couldn't believe what they were seeing. It was the latter who made Kate understand once again that this dark and sticky, crowded bunker was paradise compared to where these people came from.

All these people she saw on her way to medical were more or less okay – physically at least. It was very crowded, but that was good – it meant a lot of people had made it back. Even in the corridors Kate saw more soldiers with no or only small injuries than had returned at all the first time they'd done this. The army had gown in the last few years, and John had been able to call a lot of the divisions here before the attack.

There would be room to move once they were gone. Room to breathe. Kate would need it.

The bigger number of unharmed returnees did not mean there were fewer people who needed her help. On the contrary – the number of patients seemed to have grown in proportion, and upon entering medical, Kate seemed to be met with an equal number of soldiers and half-starved civilians.

There was a lot of work for a day or two. Kate kind of lost her already fragile sense of time for a while. A lot of people died; sometimes on their own. She measured the hours in the number of bodies that were carried out.

John showed up once, but she didn't have time to talk to him, merely acknowledged, with distant relief, that he appeared unharmed. If he wanted her attention he gave up on that after a while, for when Kate looked up the moment she had attention to spare, he was gone.

She hoped he'd taken the time to see the girls before all the organizational demands swept him off again.

Things calmed down eventually, but that didn't mean that the work was over. As soon as the urgency was gone the other work began that came with all the additions to their community. Kate had a room cleared, away from her long-term patients, where she and Li and Billy would check over all the former inmates and find out anything about them that they needed to know.

A kid named Jim assisted Kate, writing down everything relevant in a list they had copied several times to fill in. It was not a new invention – they had started using these forms even before the camps came up, used them whenever someone from the outside joined their camps. They only contained the most basic of information: name, date and place of birth, sex and gender, living family. And some people couldn't even provide that.

Many kinds who had been orphaned at a young age didn't know their own date of birth. Some couldn't even give the year. Some didn't know their family name. In cases like that Kate and her team tried to narrow down the period during which they were likely to have been born, and there were lists with common surnames that were assigned to anyone who didn't have one, because otherwise they would have names like Tommy One through Sixteen, and that was something they'd been trying to avoid.

They were also giving giving them a health check-up, and Kate found most of them lacking, as expected. Everyone was in various states of malnourishment, all were exhausted. Some were sick, but, as always, physically they were all in working condition. Because if they hadn't been, the machines would have killed them. The only ones really in need of their help where the ones injured in the attack, and the ones carrying illnesses in them that were killing them gradually, not yet having reached the point where they kept them from working.

Mentally, it was another matter. Kate knew from experience that a lot of the former inmates would have trouble fitting in here. Some would never manage, and there was only so much they could do for them. Right now she was taking care of a girl, no older than fourteen or fifteen, who had been in the camp for six years at least. She barely spoke a word, fought Kate when she tried to get her to take off her dirty rags so she could check her over and eventually attacked Jim on her way out of the door, no doubt because he was even younger than her and the easiest target in the room. The soldier in the corridor managed to grab her but she fought so hard Kate told him to let her go. There was no point to this. The girl would either end up here again or she wouldn't.

Jim had a cut over his eyes from being slammed into the wall. He was lucky. Kate had no doubt that the girl, who hadn't even told them her name, would have killed him if she'd found it convenient.

Her heart broke for the girl, who had gone through things Kate couldn't even imagine to turn her this way, but for now she had to let her go and focus on the next one. First she took care of Jimmy, who looked shaken and confused but assured her that he could go on. Then she had the next one brought in. She turned away for a second to get something from her box of supplies and when she turned back to her guest, she froze.

An old woman was sitting on the table in the middle of the room. No, not old. Middle aged, perhaps. She couldn't be older than her early fifties, but the dirty white hair and the sunken in face made her look older. Kate only knew better because she recognized her.

“Melissa?” she asked, shocked to the core. With quick steps she walked over to the woman and took her shoulders. “Oh God, Melissa, is that you?”

Melissa allowed the touch. She smiled with bloodless lips and it looked so different from the smile Kate remembered that she wanted her to stop. “Heard it was you, Katie,” she said in a low, raspy voice. “Could hardly believe it.”

Kate nodded wordlessly, her throat too constricted to speak. She couldn't believe this either, none of it.

Melissa was wearing a heavy coat, the kind the soldiers wore if they were lucky enough to get one. Someone must have given it to her, Kate thought, even though she knew it was much more likely her old friend had taken it off someone's dead body after the battle. Her mind refused to go there.

“Oh God,” Kate said again. Her fingers caught in the wild white hair and a few strands came away when she pulled them back. Melissa didn't seem to notice it. “What happened?”

Melissa's dark eyes looked right through her, at something far away. It was a look Kate had seen many times before, one that made her think an answer was unlikely. She got one anyway. “We scattered. Survived in the ruins for a while, until the machines found us. I think I'm the only one left from El Paso. Didn't see any of the others for so long.” Her voice was calm, almost serene, even though her face reflected the memory of pain and for a moment she just looked lost. “The base was attacked not long after you left, just like Connor predicted.” Finally, her eyes returned to Kate and that empty smile was back on her face. “I hear you are married now.”

“Not exactly married. But yes. We have two girls,” Kate babbled. She took the fragile looking but hard hands into hers and squeezed gently, overcome with so many conflicting emotions. “You have to meet them! I told them so much about you, about all you taught me. They're still young, especially Louisa, but they'll want to meet you.” She was babbling again.

Melissa smiled from far away. “Sure.”

Suddenly, Kate's eyes filled with tears as reality finally caught up with her. “Oh Melissa, I'm so sorry.”

Finally, Melissa returned the pressure of her hands. “Don't be, Girl. Everybody's always sorry,” she said. Her smile was frozen in stone. “It doesn't help.”

  


-

  


The woman in the hole continued to call for help all through the night. It was so quiet here that Kyle could hear her even from this distance; her mournful cry for attention. She had to know that they couldn't help her. Kyle pressed his hands over his ears and tried not to picture her down there with the dead, all alone. The machines wouldn't hurt her. It would be a waste of bullets.

He tried not to think of steep, high walls and nothing living and the cold darkness. Maybe she would be dead in the morning. He hoped so, but knew that people didn't die this fast if no one forced them to.

He was glad he didn't know her name.

He tried to think about that Connor guy and his army instead. That was all he wanted to think about. He felt funny when he did, all nervous and restless. Somewhere out there was someone who was fighting against the machines instead of just running from them. Kyle wished he could be there, too.

The threat of the machines were so much a part of his existence, he'd almost forgotten how to hate them. They were like the weather; like the cold that froze them to death, like the icy sharp wind that found its way even into Kyle's hiding places. He feared and dreaded them, hated what they did, but hating _them_ seemed almost pointless. There was nothing one could do but accept them.

Except there was, and now Kyle knew it. The thought excited him, but it also filled him with fear. Connor and the others were out there and maybe one day they would come and free them like they had freed other camps like this. But Kyle might not make it to that day. For the first time in years, the idea of his own death scared him.

He tried to picture that army, picture Connor based on the few things he had heard that evening but somehow, even though he pressed his hands over his ears really hard, he could still hear the woman in the hole and she refused to leave him alone.

The next day, she was still there. The intake of food in the morning was subdued in a place that was never happy to begin with. Her voice got stronger now, knowing they were awake. Kyle dreaded the day that lay ahead. He tried even harder than usual to catch a working place far from the hole and he did, but sometimes his tasks still took him close to it and he could see her, clawing at the walls. One time she seemed to be looking right at him and he hurriedly turned away.

Around him, people were talking more than usual. It was a subtle shift, but he noticed anyway, because any quiet sound rang loud in total silence. Kyle tried to listen to the conversations close to him, hoping they would mention Connor. Sometimes he thought they did, but he could never make out anything useful. Mostly, he realized, people were talking to distract themselves from the woman below.

A few times Kyle spotted the boy from last night among the people, and when their eyes met they nodded at each other. They had not yet spoken a single word to each other, but something had changed last night when they had shared something that might just be enough to keep them going and that was just between the two of them now. It was as if the acknowledgment that each of them wasn't alone in this made it real.

It made everything both easier to bear and harder. Kyle had spend so much time just existing from day to day, all by himself in this large group where he judged people only by the level of threat they presented, that he didn't know what do do with all these feelings he now had. Hope that this Connor would save them. The idea that things didn't have to be this way, that he could maybe do something about it if he got the chance, and the overwhelming wish to do so that sometimes got so strong it was only deeply ingrained survival instincts that kept him from getting up and doing something _now_. Worry for someone other than himself.

He hadn't felt that since Alyssa. Who had died so quickly. So had his parents (he still hoped that his mother was alive somewhere and maybe even safe but knew that for him it made no difference. She was gone either way.)

The whole situation made Kyle panic for a moment. He didn't know how to deal with being attached to someone even the slightest bit, even if it was just by looking at each other from a distance every now and again, because everyone he'd ever cared about was gone and there was no way, no way at all that this wasn't going to happen again. The world let you keep no one. So Kyle decided to ignore that other boy from now on as he had before and go back to being alone, even though the loss already made him want to cry. It wasn't even much he had lost, but it had been, for a second, all he'd had.

Then, that evening, the boy suddenly appeared beside him while Kyle was trying to pick a hiding place for the night (it paid to change them often). He held a pair of shoes in his hands and dropped them on the floor before Kyle without a word. Kyle looked at them in confusion and a little suspicious, not knowing what to think. They were worn and dirty but intact, with even a bit of inlay remaining. Cautiously, he picked them up.

“Should be about your size,” the boy finally said. “Was wearing them when I landed here. Got to replace them when they became too small for me and kept them hidden for some reason, don't know why.” He shrugged. “They're better than the new ones I got. Guess I might've hoped they'd do in an emergency. Anyway, you can have them.”

Kyle stared at the boy in wonder, all thoughts of keeping his distance forgotten. Good shoes were valuable and hard to get because the machines didn't let them keep any of the clothes stripped from the dead bodies behind the red line. Kyle had had to wear the shoes he came here with until they were way too small and worn through and gave him blisters all the time, and being unregistered he was not issued new ones once a year like everyone else (the shoes the machines gave them were thin and uncomfortable but at least they were the right size). He'd taken a pair from a woman who had not woken up one morning, before anyone else could. They were too big for him even now, after a year of growing, but they had saved him from losing toes to the cold.

Without thinking he slipped off his oversized, dirt-caked shoes and put his feet into these new ones that felt warmer the very second his toes touched them. They were still a little too big, but that meant he'd be able to wear them a little longer before he grew out of them, too. “Thank you,” he said, and was immediately surprised by how hoarse and scratchy his voice sounded. He hadn't spoken in a long, long time.

The other boy still looked down at him crouching there. He looked oddly satisfied but not in a way Kyle had come to mistrust. He also looked little tense, as if poised to run, but that might have been his bent position underneath the crate that was too low for him to stand upright. “I'm Alex,” he introduced himself.

“Kyle.”

Alex nodded in acknowledgment. Then he left. Kyle kept sitting in the increasing dark for a few more minutes, not knowing what to think. His heart was pounding in a way it hadn't in years. He wasn't sure he liked it.

Eventually, the cold and the lack of sufficient cover (this tunnel was low but still high enough for a grown up person to get in) drove Kyle to seek shelter elsewhere. For a second he considered following Alex but he didn't want the boy to hiss at him again like he had the first time they met. That would be... He didn't know what that would be. Bad.

Eventually he settled for the tunnel in the earth that connected the area below the living quarters with the metal plates the bridge and the Box were build on. Kyle avoided this part these days, when he could, and by now he no longer fit underneath the lifted plates that had protected him when he first came here. Where he had waited for Alyssa. He didn't go there now but stayed in the tunnel that someone had dug there once. It was a good hiding place anyway, as long as no one found him behind the loose plate that blocked the entrance. If anyone did, it became a trap but that had only ever happened once, and the man who'd found him was no longer here.

The woman still was, though, the one in the hole. She was crying out again. It was getting quieter. Kyle covered his ears and hoped for sleep.

  



	8. 2015 - 2/2

They had been in Arizona too long. That was was John thought every time he had a second to think. It was a familiar thought. He had thought the same thing about Kansas, and New Mexico, and pretty much every other place they had set up camp. He knew it it was also a silly thought, born from impatience. They were here because there weren't ready to leave yet and because there were still many things to do.

The liberation of the latest camp wasn't long ago yet. A lot of the men and women freed from there were willing to join his army, but they needed to recover some first, and so did the soldiers who had been injured in the fighting. The new recruits had to be trained, at least a little, but by now they had a system set up for that. A lot of the people in the camp knew how to handle weapons at least, and a few had even been in the army before they had been snatched by the machines for their labor camps. (Like Jackson from Santa Fe, who had been willing to aid in the raid on this one with an eagerness that bordered on fanaticism and hadn't returned.)

John looked at the pile of paperwork in front of him and sighed. And there was the organizational stuff to take care of, of course. All these people couldn't stay here, the bunker didn't have the capacity in the long run even for only those not joining the army. Everyone needed a place to stay, clothes, food, and something to do. They needed to figure out what to do with the children. While many of them had managed to survive without any adults taking care of them for years, it didn't sit well with anyone to just leave them to their own devices now that they were here. The youngest ones, seven or eight years old, hadn't been in the camp for long and weren't that much of a problem. They were traumatized, but then there was hardly anyone in this world who wasn't. Someone was always able and willing to take them in.

Those who had been in the camp for years, though, were difficult to deal with. Most of them were mistrustful, aggressive, their entire being set on survival with little to no empathy or compassion to stand in their way. It had helped them survive this long but it made it hard, if not impossible to integrate them in their society as it was. Early attempts to have them adopted had often ended in disaster and these days no one was willing to try.

Almost all of those problematic kids were older than eleven or twelve years, which meant that they could have found a place in the army, but even among those who wanted to join were few who made reliable soldiers. Most of them ended up being more of a danger to their comrades than any help and the recruiters had started being very careful about who they accepted.

John rubbed his eyes. This was one of the problems he had never seen coming for him eighteen years ago.

At least he knew that his father had been a soldier and a good one for all he could tell. That probably meant he hadn't been in his camp for very long. That meant he probably wasn't there now. John tried to let that thought comfort him but some days were just hard to bear.

He reached for the stack of papers in front of him and flipped through it until he found the file he was looking for: a list of all the new arrivals in the bunker. Names, ages, family – whatever data they had on them, which usually wasn't much. John sorted through it but didn't find the name he was looking for, once again unsure whether to be disappointed or relieved.

Next was the list of made-up names, where all those not knowing their family name got assigned one. John checked that one, too. Two people had been given one of those names this time, in alphabetical order, just following the list down. The alphabet was repeated over and over again, and so far John's group had filled it two and a half times in the twelve years since they started this practice. He had never checked if the name _Reese_ was somewhere on one of these lists but was certain it was, being a pretty common one. (They had consciously avoided _Connor._ ) It wasn't on this one in any case. _Richardson, Amelia_ , he read among the newest additions entered May 24 2015. _Age 17_. One of the older ones to have lost everyone so early that they didn't even know their name. The other one was a twelve-year-old entered as _Smith, Federico_. John grimaced in sympathy. That was even worse than Connor used to be. But then, the number of people named Smith had been drastically reduced in the past eighteen years.

Just like the number of Connors.

“Daddy,” a high pitched voice pulled him out of his thoughts. “Lisa is eating my hair again.”

John turned around, glad for the distraction. Jeannie was sitting on the bed where she'd been sleeping beside her sister, fruitlessly pushing at the toddler in hopes of getting her to release the long locks from between her teeth. Louisa giggled happily, not at all afraid that the older girl would actually hurt her. It was one of John's favorite sounds in the universe.

“Don't eat your sister, Lou,” he scolded gently as he walked over to the girls and picked the two-years-old up to sit on his lap while he worked, where she couldn't bother her sister. His youngest was usually quiet and easily distracted by papers and pens – not necessarily in their application to one another. Now she immediately grabbed a wooden pencil and started chewing the blunt end while her eyes where glued to the file her father picked up as if the symbols on the dog-eared sheets actually meant something to her.

Instead of going back to sleep as he had hoped, Jeannette watched them from the bed for a moment, then she came over to rest her chin on the desk and stare at the papers as if they had personally offended her. “What are you doing?”

“I'm trying to make sure we all have enough food to eat.” It wasn't technically true. Mostly, he was looking at the solutions other people had found for the problem.

“Are you gonna fight the machines for it?” Jeannie asked. She had never seen a machine up close and they fascinated her. “I wanna come!”

John suppressed a groan. She was fascinated by them and she wanted to fight them, having understood that they were bad and that those fighting them were big heroes. Whenever he took her with him when dealing with his soldiers she asked around until she found out who had destroyed the most machines lately and then followed them around with a star-stuck look of awe on her face. Her current favorite was a woman named Mildred, a sharpshooter from Brigadier General Perry's division. They had left the day before to move on to Yuma, and Jeannie was still heartbroken.

At least she still had Hernandez, who had been her favorite for a long time and in her eyes was the biggest robot-killer of all time, on account of “Dad doesn't count”. He called her his Littlest Fan and was generally a pretty decent babysitter. Unfortunately, he didn't have much more time to spare than John did. And his son Pablo had just enlisted, at the age of thirteen, and was no longer available.

“We talked about this,” John reminded his six years old daughter. “You're too small. We don't have equipment your size and the weapons would be too heavy.”

“They wouldn't! I am strong. Pablo let me hold his new gun last week and it was no problem at all.”

“I know you're very strong,” John said patiently. “But what about Lou? Are you going to leave her all alone when mommy and me aren't around to take care of her? Or do you want to take her along into battle?”

Jeanette stared at him angrily, knowing she had been defeated once again. As much as she wanted to see action and battle, she was way too protective of her baby sister to expose her to any kind of danger or leave her alone. “Of course not,” she muttered. “She's just a baby.” Now she stared at Louisa as if the little girl was the only reason she was not allowed to go out there and get shot or blown up.

“We're relying on you to help us with your sister until she's old enough, and so far you've been doing a wonderful job,” John said, to pacify her but also because it was the truth. He gently stroked her hair. “Mom and I are very proud of you.”

Jeannie didn't look entirely satisfied, but a little happier than before. “But when can I come with you when you go?” she wanted to know.

“Not for some years, sweetheart. You know how Pablo became a soldier just now? He's thirteen, and you are only six.”

“But that's so loooong!”

Not long enough, John thought. “It's not a game. You can get killed. We won't let you go until you understand that.”

“I'm not afraid.”

She should be, but John knew she really wasn't. Not of being killed, because she was a child and could not imagine that actually happening. Not of seeing others, people she'd care about, be shot to pieces beside her. They had had that discussion more than once. The problem was that while their life here was sheltered, both his daughters were growing up with death all around them. Half the people Jeanette had known in her short life were dead now, and she'd seen many more die while the staff in medical were watching over her. So his girl thought she was ready for the battlefield, not knowing how different that would be.

“But I am. And your mom is. How do your think we'd feel if you got killed? Just imagine how sad you would be if Lou suddenly died.”

Lou shifted in his lap and looked at him through big eyes. Talking about her hypothetical death had certainly gotten her attention and John regretted not having covered her eyes for that, thinking her too absorbed in the map on the desk. But the argument had gotten Jeanette's attention, too. It always did.

“I guess,” she mumbled.

John stroked her hair again, red like her mother's where Lou's was black like his. “You're time will come,” he promised her and feared that it might be true.

  


-

  


Kyle's luck ran out at the end of summer, just when the days started to get shorter and colder. It happened, ever now and again, that the machines took stock of their human workers: scanning their bar code tattoos to see who was still alive, and sorting out anyone not meeting their standards anymore. So far, Kyle had managed to avoid these inspections every time by hiding in the tunnels until they were over, but this time it caught him unaware. He'd been distracted by a pounding headache and too close to the top of the line wandering towards the workstations to get away in time.

The last thing that went through his mind before the machine pulled him aside was angry regret over getting killed now that he had good shoes and something like a friend and something like hope. He would have been okay with this half a year ago; he wasn't now. He wanted to live and get out of here together with Alex and help Connor destroy the machines. Instead he would be shot here, in the dirt of this work camp, because he was small and didn't have a tattoo burned into his arm.

And there was nothing that he could do about it. He couldn't fight. Running was pointless. Kyle hadn't felt this powerless in a long time and all he had to oppose that was impotent, helpless anger.

And all that anger went nowhere when the machine checked his arm for the tattoo, didn't find one, and then extracted another arm that burned one into his flesh before it simply let him got and turned to the next person.

The stunning realization that he was still alive paired with the nearly overwhelming pain and the familiar smell of burned flesh originating from _him_ nearly made him fall. It was only the survival instinct drilled into his bones that made him set one foot in front of the other even as he pressed his burned arm against his chest and black spots danced in front of his eyes.

Somehow, he made it through the day. He tried to focus on his work but the pain in his arm continued to distract him and made him feel weak and nauseous. The quality of his work suffered from it. If the machines noticed, he would be killed after all. So he grit his teeth and did his best to ignore the pain but it was so hard.

“You're doing it wrong,” a voice suddenly said beside him and Kyle jumped, terrified, before he recognized Alex. His friend reached for an old, broken radio that was waiting to be disassembled and spoke quietly, not looking in Kyle's direction. “I know it hurts but you shouldn't fight it. Fighting it means acknowledging it. Just let it happen and ignore it. You can't change it anyway.”

“I can't,” Kyle whispered. It hut so much he could barely breathe, and his head was killing him.

“Then they'll kill you. You learn or you die. Look at the machines.” With that, Alex disappeared to where he'd come from, leaving Kyle alone to fumbled one-handed with the lock he was dismantling.

He'd just have to hold on until it got better, he told himself. The day ended with him still alive and he retreated into his most recent hiding place without stopping for food, knowing he couldn't afford to skip a meal but too miserable to even think about eating. After a while, lying on the damp, cold earth of the tunnel, he realized that now he was registered there would be a cot up there for him, where he fire pots were, but those offered no protection at night and he couldn't deal with anything or anyone else tonight. So he curled up beneath his filthy blanket, trying to ride out the pain and fall asleep, but in the end he could barely keep from whimpering in pain and giving away his position.

How did everyone else stand it when they got their brands? Was he really that weak? He had to be. It was a wonder the machines let him live. Maybe if he'd been stronger he would have been able to protect Alyssa, and his parents, or even himself.

By the end of the night he was almost convinced that he simply didn't deserve to live, and also that he wasn't going to. One night hadn't been enough to make the pain go away or even become bearable. But he rolled out of the hidden compartment he'd spend the night in and made it out just in time for work. Too late to eat, but he was feeling too sick for that anyway. The pounding in his head was still there and it was getting worse. All day Kyle couldn't stop trembling, and he kept dropping things. Once he saw Alex looking at him from a distance, but the other boy didn't come to him today. Maybe he had seen that Kyle was too weak for this place after all and given him up.

Maybe he'd want his shoes back. But then, they didn't fit him anymore. Kyle tried to concentrate on his work but his thoughts kept going elsewhere and eventually he ended up at the pit again, disposing of the latest bunch of bodies because he'd been too distracted to avoid it.

His eyes kept wandering into the hole. He couldn't stop thinking about the woman who had fallen into it earlier this year, who had held out for days calling for help, or just calling for something. Finally, one day, she had been silent, and Kyle had seen her in there, standing out thanks to her clothes but just as still as anyone else. Later that day the big machine at the edge had lowered its big claw into the pit to pick up a few bodies. Kyle had stared at her and willed her to get up, let the thing lift her out, but of course she hadn't. Now Kyle felt so bad he was certain he would end up down there, just like her. He just hoped he would be lucky and break his neck when he landed.

But he didn't fall. There was one moment when he thought he did; when the dizziness robbed him of all sense of direction, all sense of up and down and he fell and thought he fell forever. Somehow just waiting for the ground. But his fall was stopped by a hand grabbing his arm and he was still kind of on his feet and the edge of the pit was a meter away. Kyle looked up, his sluggish thoughts unable to come up with an explanation for that face he saw before him, only grasping that it wasn't Alex.

A woman. From far away she told him to grab the edge of the nearest wagon and look busy. He held on to the edge of the wagon and managed not to fall.

As soon as he got a hold on himself, he resumed his work – or tried to, anyway. In the end he wasn't much help, but the same woman who had stopped him from falling carried most of the weight of the bodies while Kyle didn't do much more than hold up a limp or two. Slowly, he began to recognize her. She hadn't been here for long, maybe half a year. Kyle didn't pay much attention anymore to who came, unless someone registered as an immediate threat. This woman hadn't, so he only had vague memories of seeing her around. Although at the moment, all his memories were vague.

She was young, or at least not old. And dark, but not like Alex. Under her rags she was skinny like everyone and not very strong. With Kyle being this weak, they barely managed to lift up the smaller bodies into the pit, except for two really small ones that she could carry on her own. The dead grown ups they had to drag behind them by their arms or legs and one time a limp came off and Kyle fell again, this time actually hitting the ground. The arm had to have been loose already. They didn't usually do that, he thought distractedly.

After that, the woman wouldn't let him go near the edge again, telling him to wait half a body length from it while she rolled the bodies the rest of the way. Kyle watched her and imagined her falling every time she reached the pit but couldn't get his body to do anything.

At some point someone came and talked to the woman – a man, short but older. Kyle thought he heard him call her Celia and tried to remember that, but even a minute later the name was already drifting away from him. (His mind kept calling her Alyssa, but he knew that wasn't right.

Then she was gone and he was somewhere else, sorting listlessly through garbage with no clear memory of how he'd gotten there. When the signal came that the day's work was over he got up and followed the others out of habit and with the distant knowledge that he would die if he didn't.

He stumbled towards the entrance to the tunnels, not even paying attention if anyone followed him and jumped so much in sudden panic when someone grabbed him from behind that he thought he was going to be sick. But it was only Celia (was that her name?), who pushed a bowl of the colorless sludge they were fed each day at him and insisted that he had to eat.

Kyle didn't think he could but she forced him to until he had finished half of it and started gagging. He thought she finished the rest herself but wasn't sure, was caught between fighting the arm that held him close because he didn't like that and staying there because she was warm and soft. A while later he was on one of the bunks with a warm body and two blankets wrapped around him and no idea how he had gotten there.

The night passed somehow; Kyle drifted through it and emerged at the other side. He dreamed that at some point there was a man in the darkness, his voice familiar yet slippery, and that Celia argued with him about something. Then it was morning and she made him get up. Put food into his hands and forced him to eat. Kyle let her lead him, too weak and unfocused to fight anything she did.

Another day went by, with Celia always nearby and sometimes Alex, too. Someone always put something to work with into Kyle's hands and whenever he was aware enough to know where he was, he found himself in some hidden corner the machines didn't care about. Then came another night and the day after the machines did a check again, far too soon after the last one, and Kyle knew he was going to die now because there was no purpose to his existence while he was like this.

He was way back in line and Celia was nowhere to be seen when he looked around for her. Funny, somehow he had thought she would be there. He didn't know how he felt about her absence. It was hard to feel anything at all. Kyle had moved halfway towards the checkpoint before he found the energy to care about being shot, and even then being afraid came almost as an afterthought.

Once the fear settled into his brain, it took hold, though. Eventually, Kyle could think of nothing but to get away, but an opportunity only arose after several agonizing eternities, when somewhere far from him there was some commotion and everyone was distracted. Kyle didn't look to see if the machines were distracted, too. They either were, or they were not. He slipped between some wagons and then through an opening between the floor plates that had never been closed since Kyle first came here. He rolled into the dark space underneath a drainage pipe and lay still, his heart pounding hard and his thoughts all over the place.

Above him and far too close, the machine doing the selection fired at someone. A while later it did it again. Kyle drifted through the dark and listened to the sound of people dying.

  


-

  


A camp had been freed in Ohio, half a year ago. The news had reached them over radio and had been celebrated the way any good news were celebrated here: with quiet acknowledgment and a little more laughter. One day, when all this was over, John wanted for all these people to have a proper party, but even after the machines were gone it would be a long time before they had enough resources to actually have one.

Ohio was a long way from Arizona, though. Now more than ever. It had taken this long for a division from there to make it here. They had been supposed to help with the raid of the camp near Phoenix, but hadn't made it in time. Now that they finally had made it they would stick around a while, settle here after six month on the road, scouting out what used to be the United States. John had been in contact with them every now and again but he was eager to hear their report in person and detail.

Before he even met them he had had the documents they carried delivered to his room. The list of the Saved from Columbus. He could barely even remember what bullshit explanation he had given for wanting them, but he had all of those lists delivered to him from all over the country. Pointlessly, so far. This one, too, did not contain the name he was looking for.

He sighed, filled with the familiar conflicted helplessness that he was getting used to. He'd come to expect nothing else and wondered how he would react when he actually did find Kyle Reese on one of those lists. If he ever did. He might find the man through completely different circumstances. The simple fact was that he didn't know.

 _'I'm sorry, Mom,'_ he thought. _'I'm trying, for you if nothing else, but this country is really fucking big.'_ The continent, even. There were work camps all over the world, and when one got freed in France, another in Singapore, he did noting but congratulate the people there on their success. But he wasn't ruling out Canada. He suspected that his mother had been aware that she was asking for the impossible.

Accepting something as impossible had not, however, been one of Sarah Connor's strong points. Considering her personal history of general history-related murder attempts and the fact that she had a baby with a man who wouldn't be born until two decades later, that wasn't really surprising, though.

It was one of those things about his mother that had made life with her hard to take sometimes, but that was something John could never tell anyone but Kate. Recently, one of the younger soldiers had asked how his mother had been, personality-wise, and all he had come up with was “Determined.”

She hadn't been able to just sit down and do nothing, not with that ticking clock hanging over their heads, he'd explained. He'd left out how hard that was on him, never really getting a break, and even the times she'd allowed him to just have fun had been tainted by the knowledge that it wouldn't last long. Often he'd thought that his mother felt guilty whenever she did something just because she enjoyed it, because that was time not spend on saving the world. And as a result she had rarely ever done anything just for fun.

And all had been in vain in the end. Knowing this, maybe she would have allowed herself to just get a little bit _more_ out of the years that she had. Enjoy the world instead of trying to rescue it. Spend some time with her kid in places that did not smell of gun powder.

But who was he kidding? He, for his part, knew that the war would be won in 2029 and not a year sooner, and yet even the days he spend in his office taking care of important organizational matters felt like wasted time, when he could also be out on the battlefield destroying the outposts Skynet had dropped all over the place. John had children he wished he could spend more time with but his sense of responsibility for all the people everywhere wouldn't let him.

Basically the only quality time he got to spend with his girls was when he was working at his desk and they were in the room and tried to keep him from it. It had been like that earlier this morning but at some point they had said something about going to play with Billy and left. John had hardly noticed. He also didn't know exactly which of the kids his daughters sometimes explored the bunker with was Billy.

Jeannie's schoolwork lay abandoned on the bed. Someone had to make sure she actually did that, John thought. It was not like education was all that challenging these days. There were no advanced physics or biology or French classes to deal with, and the literature section of their library was remarkably small. The only thing they were keen on teaching as many young as possible, because it was the only thing really necessary in their world, was reading and writing, basic algebra, and how to survive. What to eat and what not, how to catch rats, how to test if water is drinkable or not. If they got the chance they threw in some history lessons, but those were just a bonus.

Even geography was now mostly tactically relevant, and not very reliable either.

It reminded John that he had a meeting to attend. And after the meeting he would hopefully know where to best go next and could plan the attack on the factory between here and Yuma that they had ignored so far because it was far away, not too big, and too well guarded. Under other circumstances John would probably have left it alone but they needed to pass it when they moved their HQ to California, and taking a detour around it would take too long and not be any safer. So it needed to go, as opposed to being left to rot isolation until all the big problems were dealt with. Besides, they would stop in Yuma for some time by the look of it, and John would rather not have something like that in their backyard.

He left the room and made his way to the command center. At least they had one in this bunker. It was large and round and had a table in its center. None of the walls were suitable as screens for their projector but they made do with a more of less white sheet hung between two pillars. When John arrived most of the others were already there, waiting for him. It made him feel a little guilty; they looked exhausted and he knew he wasn't the only one with too much to do in days that had too few hours.

The projector was already running. There was a presentation. John knew a lot of the things presented to him and the others about the nowhere land between here and Ohio, but there were always more details to learn and the photos definitely helped. He learned of the existence of two more camps that he had not known about before. One was so far north that it would take years for him to move the necessary forces close to it. He'd have to leave that one to General Brewster, who was in charge of the north-east and currently in Indiana. As far as John knew, he should be able to gather enough men around him to attack that camp, which did not appear to be very large. He just had to be informed of its existence.

The other camp was in Nevada. John had long since suspected that there would be one there but none of the scouts they had send into the state had come across it. None of the few people coming to them from that direction had seen it, either, though some had heard rumors.

It wasn't exactly next door, but it was close enough for them to not have any excuse to not make that detour. John looked at the photos Captain Carter had taken there and thought that even if it had been further away there would have been no excuse not to help those people. Saving people, in any way they could, was the reason this army existed after all.

Still, it would take time. Getting there, getting the lay of the land, assembling enough men for such an attack. The ones going for the camp near Phoenix had already scattered again, trying to cover as much ground as possible without losing too much efficiency. Their supplies had to replenished, and the new soldiers who'd recently enlisted had to be trained. As much as it pained John, he didn't see the liberation of that place happening within the next ten months.

They would be ready at about the same time as Bob Brewster and his men would be ready for their approach on the camp in Michigan.

That was one positive thing John could notice, at least: When they found the first camp in Santa Fe, they needed four years and troops from all over the country to attack. Now they had enough men in their army to attack two of those places at once.

It was not guarantee that the attacks would go well. The last one Bob had led had been a disaster because the machines had noticed the presence of his army in the area, had obviously deducted from previous experiences what was about to happen, and before the soldiers even got close to the camp, the machines in there had killed every inmate, including the soldiers who had volunteered to let themselves be caught and incarcerated. They needed to be more careful. While they were learning from their previous missions, so did the enemy.

Other parts of the report made by Carter and this team contained information about the communities that had formed in the ruins of various towns, about the places were a lot of things could still be salvaged, and an overview of the people they had been able to convince to join them. In one case an entire camp of almost forty scavengers had torn down their proverbial tents and joined the army, some of them sticking with Carters division right there and then. John had long since realized that missions in the nowhere lands were necessary not only to get the lay of the land but also to show their presence to the people out there for whom John Connor's rebellion against the overwhelmingly powerful enemy used to be too far away.

Their fight to free the camps also contributed to their army growing. It wasn't so much that the former inmates joined them – although many of them did – as a lot of soldiers were always lost in the battle. But when word got around, the people living in hiding in the ruins saw that they were actually accomplishing something and they found the courage to join them and fight the machines rather than just try to somehow survive them.

There was probably some irony in there, John thought. When he's been a child, people had always wanted to have everything. Now, they just wanted to live.

There was more, though. The machines were drilling for oil not three hundred kilometers from here, and if the army could take control of that site from them without it being burned down like the last one they had tried to take had been, it would be a major victory. John had to decide which to tackle first, though: the camp or the oil. The answer wasn't at obvious as he wished it would be. Taking the oil production would save more lives in the long run than there were inmates in the camp, and it would make freeing the camp easier, too. On the other hand they might be losing too much time there, as the camp in question would probably run out of work and be violently closed in not much over a year from now. John would seek the council of the other brass but in the end it would be up to him to decide whether or not he would risk sacrificing those people.

Or maybe he would just ask Kate. In medical she had to face decisions like that on a smaller scale almost every day.

It was a decision to be tackled after this meeting, and this meeting was nearing its end. There was only one more thing Cater wanted to bring up, and that was the sighting of a new kind of enemy that hadn't made it here yet and that they hadn't seen in action so far so they couldn't tell how dangerous, exactly, it would be. John waited with a growing feeling of trepidation while they put in the pictures they had taken, the way he always did when a new type of machine showed up. It was different this time, though, because this time it was a machine the others hadn't immediately identified as much of a threat, and that made him feel uneasy in a way he hadn't in a long time.

The picture Carter presented had been taken from a long distance. The machine it showed was small and a little out of focus but it was still easy to make out the general shape as it was walking down an abandoned street.

Walking. On legs.

“We're not sure what these are for,” Carter explained. “Even though they are shaped like a person, they'd never pass as one even if they put clothes on them. And they don't seem to have weapons attached to them, at least not as far as we could see. Our best guess is that this is an unfinished prototype for a bot that's meant to go where chain wheels and tires can't take them, and that the weapons will be added later. So far they don't seem to be much of a problem compared to the others.”

John had to close his eyes for a second as another piece of the puzzle slid into place; as history took anthoer step down its preset, inevitable path. The machine on the picture seemed to stare at him. Even from the distance the red glowing eyes were clearly visible. “Don't dismiss them,” he warned Carter. “Take a good look. That, right there, is the face of the enemy.”

  


-

  


Kate had been worried about asking Melissa to work in her clinic at first – worried that the older woman wasn't ready yet to work with sick and injured people again after her long and terrible experiences at the camp, but also, she found, worried that Melissa, whom she had half-consciously used as a kind of role model for more than half her life, would find it wanting. Melissa looked appreciative enough, though, if a little subdued, and her hands were steady when she handled bandages and sewed shut open wounds, or got out bullets. Kate had introduced her to her staff with a smile that hadn't wanted to fade and Li and Bill had appeared genuinely pleased to meet her. Kate had mentioned her every now and then, not thinking she'd ever see the woman again.

She still couldn't believe she had.

Still, she made sure her old friend didn't work too long, because it was obvious that she had changed, that the camp of the machines had taken something from her that she would only slowly get back. Kate hoped that the work she now did would help her find herself again. Helping people, doing good, had to be something good and healing for her after all the death. Melissa had always found fulfillment in the helping of others. Once she was well, her presence alone would be invaluable.

A noise caught Kate's attention around midday and called her into the corridor, wiping the blood from a surgery they had just performed off her hands with a cloth and hoping that she'd just managed to save one unlucky civilian's life.

She had identified the sound correctly: It was Louisa, sniffing – a sound she'd recognize everywhere. Lou was hanging off Jeannie's arm, and Jeannie was angry and discussing with Henry, who kept insisting that she couldn't go see her mom now as her mom was doing important work just this moment. How exactly he had landed “Do not disturb” duty was beyond Kate. He usually had more important things to do.

Maybe he'd just wanted a chance to finish that novel he's started reading in January...

“That's fine, I just finished,” she said, stepping over to them. Immediately Lou let go of her sister and ran over to bury her face in her mother's thigh. Kate sighed and crouched down to take her into her her arms. A part of her was exhausted and just wanted a break, a part of her was worried about what caused this. A part of her was glad that through all her absences she still had enough meaning to her daughters that their first instinct in case of trouble was to run to her.

Kate briefly considered taking the girls into the clinic, but there was still so much blood on the floor and while her children were disturbingly used to the sight, it wasn't something that calmed down agitated emotions. On top of that, Melissa was still in there, Kate wanted Jeanette and Louisa to meet her, but not yet. Melissa was still frayed around the edges and the girls were hardly in a state to appreciate her anyway.

So she took them to the first quiet corner she could find, which happened to be just a little bit down the corridor, as this area was generally avoided by anyone who wasn't sick or dying or working here. She asked what was wrong and Lou just sobbed a little more, though Kate got the feeling that it was just for the heck of it. The little girl didn't get a lot of chances to just let go of her emotions, so Kate let her.

Jeannie, however, was angry. As angry as a six-years-old in a post-apocalyptic underground base could muster, and that was very angry. “Mila hit her,” she raged. “And she took her scarf.”

“The one Dad brought back for you?” Kate asked. “The silk one?” It had been a rare find. Not really useful as wool was preferred for its warmth, and too brightly colored for anyone going outside to wear anyway, but it had been high quality, relatively clean, and whole. John had stuffed it in his pockets and given it to Jeanette, two years ago, when Lou had still been a baby, as a sign that he thought about them even during his long absences. Lou had loved to chew on it, loved the smooth, colorful material, so Jeannie had gifted it to her in a grand gesture on her second birthday.

“Yeah.” There were tears in Jeannie's eyes now, but they were tears of anger. “I tried to get it back but she hid in the tubes. I couldn't find her.”

“You're not supposed to play in the tubes,” Kate reminded her, sternly.

“I wasn't playing. I was looking for Mila!”

“Doesn't matter! You don't go there, you tell one of the grown ups if there's something wrong. Do you understand me?”

“The grown ups don't fit.” Apparently she didn't.

“I don't care. Did you take your sister there with you? Or did you leave her all alone after someone hit her?” Kate's voice left no doubt that neither alternative was acceptable.

Jeannie's eyes turned wide and filled with tears. But she still looked angry, just also guilty now.

“Who is Mila anyway?” Kate wanted to know. “A friend of yours?”

“No! She's one of the girls who came from the camp. We played together but then she was mean and ran off.”

That was what Kate had feared. There were a few kinds like that hanging out at the bunker, hiding from the adults, stealing and fighting, and no one really knew what to do with them. Kate felt sorry for them – for what they had been through and for the fact that they might never find a place even in this broken world because of it – but all the same she didn't want them her own kids anywhere near them.

“I told you not to play with those kids,” she reminded her daughter. “This is why! You always claim you're big enough to fight, Jeanette, but you're not even big enough to listen.”

Now Jeanette no longer looked furious. Only embarrassed and tearful. Miserable. Kate's first instinct was to comfort her and make that look go away but the girl wouldn't learn anything like that and eventually she or her sister would get hurt worse than this. “Now, go back to our room,” she ordered. “Take Lou. I'll come as soon as I clean up here.”

Jeanette obeyed without protest, taking her still sniffling sister by the hand and running off. Kate suspected that she felt guilty already, about the prospect of having subjected “Lisa” to danger, if nothing else. Kate would make peace and with her and offer comfort as soon as her daughter acknowledged that she'd been acting wrong.

At some point in the last six years she had turned into her own mother. But, God damn it, somebody had to be.

She went back to the clinic, checked on her patient and cleaned off all remaining blood she had missed. When she was done she figured that Jeannie had had enough time to ponder what had happened and understand why her mother was unhappy with her. When she got to their room, her oldest was playing nurse maid for her sister, who patiently let Jeannie clan her dirty face and check over her hand with great solemnity. There didn't seem anything badly wrong with it. Kate suspected that it had been the shock rather than actual pain that made the little girl cry so much.

Kate had to smile at the sight. It was as if Jeanette wanted to make up for her failure earlier by being extra-caring and Lou didn't even notice there had been a failure because she adored her big sister.

 _'You'd love them, Mom,'_ she thought to herself. Then, more sourly, _'So would Dad, if he were actually here often enough to get to know them.'_ Her father had met Jeannie once of twice and adored her, too, but he hadn't been around since Lou was born. Kate knew she couldn't hold it against him, that this world and his job simply didn't allow for quality time with the family, but sometimes she still did.

Perhaps because she knew that if the world had not ended, things with him would probably be exactly the same.

Five minutes later she had learned that the girl called Mila hadn't actually hit Lou but shoved her so hard she fell over and hurt her hand. Which wasn't all that much better, especially since Lou wasn't three years old yet and Mila had to be at least nine or ten. Jeannie promised to stay away from her from now on, and from all other kids she didn't know, and to stay away from the tubes, especially if Louisa was with her, which was basically all the time. Kate then notices her abandoned school stuff on the floor beside the desk and was about to make her practice spelling until it was time for Kate to scrap together something to eat, when the door opened and John came in, looking grim.

It was the kind of expression that told Kate that Jeanette's homework had to wait. Instead, she send the girls out to play and they left with only minimal protesting, knowing that it would be pointless.

“What happened?” Kate asked. “Another attack? Another base lost? Another _country_ lost?” They were keeping in contact with the rest of the world; everywhere people were interested in John's expertise with the machines and to learn from their experiences, as the former States were usually the place where new Skynet-related developments happened first. They hadn't heard anything from Japan and Korea in months, South Africa had fallen silent in April, and were fairly certain that there was nothing living left in Portugal.

“Nothing like that,” John assured her. He sat down on the edge of the bed and rested his arms on his knees, looking tired the way he only ever allowed himself around her, and maybe Hernandez. “I received a report from the division exploring Nowhere today.”

Kate nodded. She had been aware of this. Had, in fact, expected John to be already preparing the next big mission to go on himself based on that report, as if there were no one else in the entire world he could send. She was a little surprised she got to see him at all before that happened, which could only mean that he had learned something that affected him so much he had to share it with her first. Which meant it would affect all of them, sooner or later, but then, what didn't?

The fact that he had come to her instead of just sharing his concerns with Hernandez for the moment did, however, mean that it was either something she needed to know _urgently_ , or something he couldn't talk about with anyone else.

She swallowed dryly. Those things were never, ever good. “What is it?”

John pulled out a picture; a print out, black and white. He handed it to Kate and for a second after unfolding the paper she didn't know what she was looking at. Ruins. Dust. It could be anything.

Then she saw the machine on the street, and found the second sheet stuck behind the first one with a close up of the machine's face. Like a parody of a human. A skull. Like Skynet could only perceive people as things that were dead.

“It that...” She trailed off, at the same time horrified and enthralled. Her heart was racing.

“A Terminator,” John confirmed. “The kind of thing that tried to kill my mom.”

“They're here,” Kate whispered. This, right there, was the type of robot that would be send back in time to prevent John's existence when all other hope was lost for the machines. When they had been defeated.

When the war was over.

“It's going to happen, then.” Kate couldn't seem to look away from the thing in the picture. It horrified her, but it also filled her, absurdly, with hope. “They already made those. That means the war is almost over, right?” She looked at John, willing him to confirm it. That this war would end before their babies were old enough to fight in it.

There was an end, and for the first time it seemed visible. They had been doing this for going on twenty years, until Kate sometimes felt it was all there had ever been.

But John looked at her like she was breaking his heart and she already knew that he was going to break hers. Then he had the gall to laugh, one of those harsh, bitter sounds he never voiced around anyone but her. “Does it look like we're inches away from victory? That's a prototype, Kate. You and I know that before this whole time travel plot goes anywhere, they will perfect them, turn them into cyborgs that pass as human. They develop in stages. _This_ ” - he pointed at the pictures in her hand - “is stage one.”

“I'm not talking about tomorrow, John,” Kate snapped, unwilling to give up her hope. “Or even next year. But it could be soon, couldn't it? They got this far, they wouldn't have designed their bots this way unless they were already planning to make them pass as people. So your fake-humans won't be far off. Who knows how far we'll be in our fight in a year or two? Just look how big the army has grown in the past-” She stopped herself. In the past eighteen years. They started with nothing and it took them this long until they were even able to effectively fight in two places at once.

“It's not going to be soon,” John insisted. “The Terminator that came after Mom was a model 800. How long do you think it'll take to get there? I wager it'll be years before we even have to deal with the infiltrators that look like rubber people.”

“You're sounding damn convinced of that,” Kate growled, acid in her voice. She took a step closer to the bed, towered over him. “Damn it, John, I know you're lying to me! You know exactly when the war is going to end, don't you?”

“I know enough to tell you that it won't be soon,” John amended.

“You know what else you should be aware of?” Kate snapped. “That Jeanette can't fucking wait to be old enough to go out and fight and get killed out there! So you better tell me that it'll be over before we have to bury her!”

John didn't say anything. He looked at her angrily, but he also looked guilty.

“Damn it!” Kate cursed. “You're her father! How can you let that happen?”

“What do you expect me to do?” John shouted back. “I can't speed up time. I can't advance our technological development and fill the ranks of the army with clones, and I sure as hell can't push along the development of the machines. Everything is going to happen exactly as it will and there is _nothing_ I can do about it!”

Kate felt like slapping him. For a moment it made her so mad that he was as helpless as she was. That he had given her this hope only to take it away, even though she knew that hadn't been his intention. It was irrational, but acknowledging that didn't help.

Despair. That was the true enemy here, not John. She was so used to the bleakness of this world that she barely took notice anymore, but the brief encounter with treacherous hope had brought the desperation to the surface and put it into stark contrast.

“Why did you tell me, then?” she asked, fighting tears she didn't want to shed because in the face of everything, this hardly seemed worth it. If the terminators didn't mean the war was almost over, they meant nothing.

“Because you need to know about this,” John said. He was calming down himself; now he just sounded tired. “Because you know what they mean and no one else does.”

No one else did. That was the true reason, Kate realized. John hadn't considered how she might find hope in the terminators' appearance. Because he didn't, knowing things he'd never shared with her. He had told Kate, even though it wasn't urgent yet, because obviously this thing had hit him hard and he wanted to share it with her since he had no one else. Kate didn't have it in her yet to feel guilty for her reaction. Maybe later, when the anger and the despair he had unwittingly bestowed her with had faded. But probably not.

“You said it yourself,” she said quietly. “It may be years before they show up in disguise.”

“Yes. But I might not be around by then anymore. In that case you need to prepare for them, warn everyone.”

Now Kate just looked at him. He wasn't playing fair here. Reminding her that he could drop dead any moment. It was as if he _wanted_ her to feel bad about being angry, and even while she knew he wasn't that petty, it made her anger flare up again. She suppressed it, but still felt like crying.

Her emotions were all over the place and for once she felt they needed an outlet. She hadn't had one in years. Maybe when John was gone she'd just curl up for two minutes and bawl.

“You're not going to die,” she reminded him, meaning to make her voice sharp, like a knife, but sounding just dull and toneless to her own ears. “You know that as well as you know that they war won't end tomorrow.”

“Do I? I just know that I'm instrumental to creating the army. As far as I know I have already done my job.”

He'd told her he'd send the guy who saved his mom back himself. He'd still be live at that point. But they couldn't rely on that, obviously. Kate didn't know how immutable time was in the end; she just knew that John wasn't immortal and they couldn't take the fact that he was supposed to live for granted. That might just mean handing Skynet its victory on a silver platter without it ever having to built a time machine.

There were a lot of thoughts that could follow that one. Like how that would obviously not happen because then Kate wouldn't be standing here having these thoughts. It didn't matter. Sometimes, ignoring what she knew about the future was the only way to remain sane. And John was right insofar as that she had to know about the terminators so someone would be around who was aware of the danger in case he did, for whatever reason, not return from his next mission.

“So now I know.”

“Yeah.” John ran a hand through his hair, his gaze moving to something far away. “We need to warn everyone before they infiltrators show up. Need dogs to identify them.”

“We have dogs.”

“We have _two_ dogs, in the entire base, and the guys who brought them already have a hard time justifying sharing our food with them. How will we explain it to everyone? 'Hey, I have this inkling that the machines will try to imitate humans soon, take this puppy?'”

“You'll think of something. You always do.” Already John was moving on from their personal drama to the bigger matters at hand. At times like this, it was hard to bear him. None the less Kate found herself thinking about the same problem.

What did their private drama matter, in the end?

“They are shaped like people,” she finally said. She didn't want to have this conversation but here she was, having it. “There really is no reason for that unless they want to pass as people. Point this out to everyone and call it a hunch.” As far as plans went, this wasn't brilliant, but it would probably do.

John looked at her. “You're right. That's the best we can do at this point.”

How much easier it would be if they could just tell everyone the truth. But for every argument in favor of doing that there were two against it. Even their own children didn't know. They wouldn't understand yet. Maybe one day- Kate hoped that they would be able to sit them down and tell them over dinner one day, when the war was over and it didn't matter anymore. If they still had children at that time.

John stood; slowly, like an old man. “I gotta go,” he said. Kate didn't stop him. She didn't even say goodbye. In fact, she was almost glad to see him go, to be left alone, because her self-control was at an end.

The moment the door closed behind him she threw herself onto the bed, curled into a ball and sobbed until she could no longer tell apart all the reasons.

  


-

  


The first snow of the year came with the first storm. Alex couldn't remember ever really having felt warm in his life, but the icy wind that seemed to have a mind of its own and a determination to get under the layers of his clothes and chase out all the body heat they held made him appreciate the short time in the middle of the year when it was just cold instead of freezing. (His parents had told him that this part of the country used to be very warm in their youth, before the war, with palm trees and beaches and everyone running around in shorts and tank tops. But Alex couldn't imagine anyone treating a tank top as anything other than underwear, the beaches had been mined for those seeking to find out if the word was better at the other side of the water, and he didn't even know what a palm tree was.)

That night was miserable. Alex spend it huddled with Laina in a dead-end tunnel they wouldn't have chosen on any other night. Times like this, when the weather was so vicious, no one came down here if they didn't have to, as the wind always found entry somewhere and turned most parts of the tunnels into a freezer. So it didn't matter that the little oasis of calm they had found was easily accessible and could quickly turn into a trap.

He hoped the wind would be gone the next day. Working through a storm was always hard and horrible and people always froze. People were freezing right now, probably, right above them. Those outside, under the roofs that had no walls. Those who were too weak to keep the stronger ones from stealing their blankets. Cecilia might have frozen tonight, Alext though, since she'd given her blanket to Kyle a few days ago. Maybe he would have given her his, just sharing Laina's between the two of them. The girl certainly wouldn't have minded. She might have shared hers with Cecilia but the woman wouldn't have allowed her up there. It didn't matter now, anyway.

He wondered if Kyle was even still alive now. The little boy had been in a pitiful state the last time Alex had seen him. Usually, this place didn't tolerate weakness like that. But he'd managed to hide before the machines could sort him out and Alex was hoping against hope that he would recover, even without care and warmth and food. He remembered dimly having been very sick himself when he'd been six or seven and his parents had strained their meager supplies until there was nothing left, had traded their last bit of fuel for medicine just so he would live. Alex had often wondered it it was this that forced them to move on after he'd gotten better, making them cross the wasteland to L.A. where, eventually, the machines had found them. He tired not to think about it.

His father had not made it even that far. His mother had died after a year in the camp, when hard work and lack of nourishment and care wore away her strength until the machines decided there was not enough left to be worth what little food they gave them. His little sister had been sorted out when they arrived, having been too small and weak to be of use. Svenja had been five. About the age Kyle had been when he'd shown up here, just not as lucky. Or unlucky. Sometimes Alex envied her. He imagined her being with their parents in that elusive “better place” his mother would talk about. In this place, that was really all they had to look forward to.

It kind of made him wonder why he and Cecilia ever tried to save that little boy. They certainly weren't doing him a favor. Perhaps it was instinct – Kyle was small and seemed extraordinarily vulnerable. Alex had seen from his reaction when that woman had fallen into the pit this summer that somehow, he managed to still care. He could see why Cecilia had wanted to protect him, following some motherly drive or whatever. He wasn't so sure about his own motives. It didn't cost him anything, not really, so there was no real reason against it, he marveled. Emotional attachment was dangerous, but he wasn't going to get all attached. Right now, he could wonder if the kid still lived and not feel anything in particular at the fact that the answer was probably No. And besides, if the only good thing waiting for him in the future was being reunited with his family in death, what did he have to lose?

The thing with Kyle was, probably, that Alex remembered the day he'd arrived here. He had stood out because he was so much younger than they usually were and at first it had made Alex angry that he was allowed to live, if only by chance, while Svenja had had to die in that horrible, horrible way, crushed to death in that ugly, looming block of a building that Alex couldn't even look at without feeling sick. He had waited for the boy to die, and every time he caught a glimpse of him over the next years he had found himself surprised that he was still alive. Until he just started working like everyone else and simply became another worker, albeit an unmarked one. For Alex he'd faded into the background after that. Until that night he'd joined him in eavesdropping on that conversation on Connor's army.

It was ridiculous that the kid would survive this much and this long only to then be taken by some random illness, or infection, or whatever this was. It didn't matter that this was a common cause of death around here, it still didn't seem fair. If the sickness didn't take him, he would starve or freeze in his hiding place. There really was no point in thinking about it anymore.

Laina snuggled closer against him, sniffing softly. She couldn't sleep either, though probably for other reasons.

The hole Kyle was hiding in was pretty safe and should keep most of the wind away. At least Alex hoped so. He had only been there once, to bring the boy some food and make him eat, but that was days ago. He hadn't dared to come after that because someone had always seemed to watch him and Alex hadn't wanted to give away Kyle's position. That would have been a sure way to kill him in his state, if nothing else did.

Morning came, mercilessly, with pale light and no warmth at all. The wind was still blowing but it had gotten lesser. Work this day would still be unpleasant, yet Alex was glad that the night was over.

Laina disappeared the moment the signal sounded to announce the distribution of food. Alex followed more slowly. He was hungry, like he always was, but also stiff, feeling dizzy with exhaustion before the day even started, and oddly slow in everything he did, like there was lead sinking into his marrow. Finding the energy to get up was hard. Even the thought of food held little motivation.

When he got up and grabbed his breakfast, however, he saw Kyle sitting at the edge of the camp, holding a bowl of the colorless sludge that passed as food here and looking at the crowd like it was something puzzling beyond his capacity to understand. He was even paler then usual, with circles around his eyes that seemed to be drawn with ashes and dirt, but his entire face lit up when he saw Alex.

Alex hurried over to him, bringing his own bowl. Maybe this day wouldn't be all horrible after all. He sat beside his little friend so that the wind couldn't get him full force and they ate in silence, because Alex couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't stating this obvious.

Kyle ate about half of his bowl. After the long time that had passed since anyone had brought him something to eat he had to be ravenous, but he gave his leftovers to Alex in a way that indicated if he didn't eat them they would go to waste. And Alex would never let food go to waste. Even if it sucked and made him long for the roasted rat he had last eaten the day before the machines got them, almost five years ago.

“Where's Celia?” Kyle eventually asked, when the signal sounded again and they stood to go to their work stations. Today, there didn't seem to be a check up, and Alex was glad, because he wasn't sure Kyle would pass it yet. Usually he wouldn't expect one just two days after the last – they normally happened once a month at best – but lately, there had been a lot. The camp was full and the machines were sorting every time a new pile of people was delivered.

“Who?” he asked distractedly. His eyes were on the crowd but no one was being picked out and scanned today, “You mean Cecilia,” he realized after a second. “The woman who helped you?”

Kyle nodded wordlessly, his eyes scanning the crowd. “I don't see her.”

“She'd dead,” Alex informed him. “The bots sorted her out two days ago.”

People dying had been a part of his life for so long that he didn't think anything about stating the fact. When Kyle's eyes turned even wider and then filled with tears he reconsidered, but it was too late, or course. Who would have though that the damn kid had somehow managed to preserve the ability to care when someone he barely knew kicked it?

Kyle drew up his shoulders and seemed to shrink into himself. He didn't look at Alex anymore. “Why?” he asked in a small voice. “She was fine. Wasn't she?” The question was genuine. Kyle had been pretty sick since the woman had first approached him. He probably wouldn't have noticed if she's missed two limps and been covered in sparkling rash.

“She was pregnant,” Alex explained. “The machines found out when they scanned her and then they shot her.” At least that was quick. Alex hoped it would offer a little bit of comfort. (Times like this he didn't want to think about Connor and his army and the fact that maybe there was an end to this that wasn't death. Times like this he just hoped that when his own time came, or Kyle's, it would be quick like that.)

But Kyle didn't seem consoled. He seemed shocked, looking at Alex again, his eyes wild. “No,” he said, with more force than Alex thought he even had in him. “She wasn't! She hadn't been. You're wrong!”

Alex sighed. He didn't know if Kyle though he was wrong about her having been killed or about the reason for it. Probably the latter – he still looked heartbroken, just confused and frantic on top of it. “She only got knocked up a few days before, after the last check.”

“But...” Kyle trailed off, then shook his head. “She wouldn't,” he insisted.

Of course she wouldn't, not willingly. Not knowing that pregnancies were a death sentence. “Well, it's not like she had a choice, is it?” Alex snapped. But he could actually understand the kid's confusion. Cecilia had been a grown woman and grown women who knew getting fucked might get them killed fought hard. They were usually left alone because most guys wouldn't risk getting hurt, especially now that any bad cut or sprained wrist could lead to termination.

Oh well. Kyle didn't need to know how that happened, in particular. He had all the information Alex was willing to share, and they probably didn't make him feel any better, but it could have been much worse.

Maybe Alex should have lied, though. Said she fell and broke her neck, or something like that. Something kinder. He had mostly forgotten how to care, and right now seemed a bad time to remember.

It was cold, after all, getting colder every day. Another winter that would take many, and Alex wondered if this was the year Kyle would finally run out of luck. It would fit the way the world worked, in Alex' experience, if the boy were to die now that he had apparently decided that the prospect of that ominous army showing up here some day and getting them out was worth holding on for.

That would still be better than holding on for years and years and years for rescue that never came. Because deep inside Alex was convinced that that was what really lay in store for them. After the initial excitement had faded he'd come to the conclusion that he was too old to hold on the straws, hoping they would make him float, but Kyle... Kyle was still able to believe, however he managed to do that, and Alex feared that that was actually worse.

Especially when later that day, he asked Kyle what he actually wanted to do when he got out of here, just to get that forlorn expression off his face, and Kyle started talking about how he would join Connor's army and fight the machines until they were all gone and couldn't hurt anyone anymore. Because he spoke with such conviction that Alex found himself believe it would happen, after all.

Well. Not to Kyle if he wasn't very careful. He still looked exceptionally miserable, and Alex could see that he was still in pain from having his bar code burned in, favoring the other arm where possible. He couldn't remember it having been that bad for him, when he got his own tattoo, but he had been in a generally better state altogether back then. And he did remember that it hurt. A lot.

In fact, it happened every now and again that someone passed the scan for physical fitness when first admitted here, got their code burned in, and then was sorted out a few days later because they developed an infection or couldn't ignore the pain enough to work as they were supposed to. Alex worried now. If Kyle kept doing such a half-assed job carrying things, eventually the machines would notice.

“You need to ignore it,” Alex therefore told him that evening after work. “Blank it out.” What was that his father had told him so long ago? “Pain is actually just an information from your body to your mind that there is something wrong with the part that is hurting, so you can do something about it. But there is nothing you can do here. Meaning the pain is useless. Even worse than useless: if you let it control you, it can get you killed. So you gotta control it instead. Stop paying attention to it as long as it can't be helped. Don't let it get you.”

He wasn't sure if Kyle really got that and knew for sure it wasn't as easy as it sounded. But Kyle listened intently like he always did when Alex told him something and nodded solemnly, like he had just been given a great and important task he was determined to carry out. God, this kid. Alex resisted the urge to ruffle his hair – showing too much attachment to someone could get either party killed easily enough if the wrong person saw it. Instead he went to grab a blanket from the pile handed out by the machines and disappeared to the back of the habitation zone.

Laina was waiting there, though apparently not for him. She threw him a very dark look before she moved away, disappearing into the tunnels at the only opening available in this area. (There used to be more but the others had been barred in the last two years.) She was angry with Alex and he was neither surprised nor did he blame her, but he also wouldn't let it influence him. Laina wasn't his friend, she was just a girl he wasn't entirely indifferent about, just like ha hadn't been entirely indifferent to Cecilia. Mostly, when they stuck together it was to their mutual benefit.

She was eleven or twelve – almost Alex's age, but much smaller. So she still fit through the side tunnel to the left of the entryway, while Alex had to crawl on. He was getting too big for a lot of the hiding place down here and was beginning to spend more and more nights voluntarily on top. It wasn't as dangerous for him anymore, though – that was the upside of growing. Soon he would be all grown and no one would bother him anymore. He would be able to get a spot at the heating pots, and maybe he'd even be able to protect the smaller ones, like Kyle.

Yeah, right.

Shivering, Alex crawled deeper into the tunnels, looking for a place where at least the wind wouldn't find him.

  



	9. 2016 - 1/3

Yuma was empty. It was one of many, many empty places Justin Perry had visited in the last two decades, but few had been as eerie as this one. Santa Fe had been a graveyard strewn with the leftovers of corpses in the few ruins that were left standing. Tampa had been gone; there simply had been nothing left for anyone to survive in, the buildings obliterated by more than one blast from the sky. And El Paso had been set on fire some time after the war, the flames cleaning the city of anyone hiding in there and anything those who escaped might have wanted to come back for. All those places had been disturbing, but the corpse of Yuma took the cake because it looked, and not just from the distance, like it should still be alive.

A large portion of the city had been left standing. People had survived here, more than in most other cities. They saw the signs of habitation after Judgment Day: nests of blankets in windowless rooms, empty cans piled up behind houses, hand-dug wells in backyards. They found bullet holes in walls, outside and inside the houses. Found scorch marks. Found any room no longer convenient when the cold and the machines came stripped bare of anything useful. What they did not find were people. Alive or dead.

It was obvious that people had been here, and now they were gone. The cold had preserved the leftovers of whatever they had been doing at the time of their disappearance, making it clear beyond a doubt that they had left suddenly and without warning – something Justin and his men had already known.

In some spots there was blood on the walls or on the ground. Things were toppled over. Besides the bullet holes, these were the only indicators of the violence that had taken this place.

Some of those fights had doubtlessly been between looters and scavengers fighting for supplies, before the machines came here. And a lot of people had doubtlessly died of cold, illness, starvation. Not to mention those killed in the attack in 1997. In any other place their remains still decorated the area because no one had had the means or the energy to get rid of _all_ the corpses. But here there were none. Someone _had_ taken them all.

They knew who. What they didn't know was why. There were several theories about what they machines wanted with all the dead bodies. Did they even keep them? It was known that most were buried or destroyed in the work camps set up all over the country, but some seemed to be taken for other purposes. Perhaps to learn more about how humans worked and how better to kill them, some thought. Justin doubted that, though – Skynet had had access to plenty of medical databases before it destroyed them. It definitely already knew now to effectively kill humans, and while the computer was a cruel bastard, Justin was reasonably sure that it lacked any kind of desire for sadistic experiments just for the heck of them.

On the other hand, the machines were driven by a need for effectiveness and therefore probably constantly looking for more effective ways of murder. Justin knew from reports that in some of the camps people were taken aside for experimentation with gasses and other stuff. It was the only thing he could ever have imagined to make those places even more horrible.

In terms of effectiveness, though, experiments on living specimen were definitely better than on dead bodies, so there still was no satisfying explanation as to why they removed the corpses from some areas, even the old ones that were little more than bones. Perhaps they wanted to clean the world of any reminder that humans ever existed, but that would have required some sort of logical reasoning on their part and Justin couldn't for the life of him figure out what that would be.

Maybe it would forever remain a mystery. It wasn't like they could dress anyone up as a robot and send them in to spy.

As opposed to the robots, or so it seemed. A few months ago scouts had seen human-shaped machines in the ruins of deserted cities, and for a while their purpose had been anyone's guess. Sure, the human body had a convenient shape, but it was not the most practical one there was – the most practical one probably included tentacles. And machines with tentacles and eyes on all sides already existed, had for years. Considering that, the humanoid shape had been a bit of a step backwards.

Sure, in the movies Justin remembered from his youth, robots always had been shaped like people, but those robots had always been created by people, always aiming to build things in their own image. For machines build by machines that was no explanation.

Until Connor had pointed out that maybe it was. The human-bots hadn't officially appeared yet. They had not been involved in any attack anyone lived to tell about, had only been sighted rarely and by coincidence in areas devoid of people. It was Connor who had come up with the theory that they were just prototypes, and that the finished product would look even more like men. Enough to pass as human and infiltrate their bases, attack them from the inside.

The theory seemed pretty far out there whenever someone else tried to explain it, but when Connor presented that idea he spoke with such conviction that it was hard to imagine any other explanation. Never mind the fact that other explanations were nowhere to be found.

Connor just had this way about him, though, that made people believe him and believe in him, Justin included. Many a man might have given up hope long ago if not for Connor unwavering and infections conviction that they would win this war one day and live in peace again, to rebuild the world from the ashes they now called home. Justin included. But standing here, in the deserted city of Yuma, Even Connor's words seemed hollow. Standing here in this empty place, Justin became aware, more than he ever had since joining this army, just how close they were to extinction.

Absurd as it sounded, they normally just focused on the victories they scored and blinded out that they were needle pricks in the grand picture. Connor had a talent for making them pay attention to the good stuff and make the bad stuff seem a little further away. It was something that may have saved more people than guns and explosives had. But it also made this moment seem all the bleaker, when Justin had to accept that they were living in a tiny bubble of bearable existence swimming in a sea of suck.

Their army had less than ten thousand members, including those on the other side of the country. There were another several thousand civilians connected to it. Altogether, they weren't enough to fill a medium-sized city and they were spread thin. Their best guess was that mankind had another few hundred thousand people on offer who were hiding in the ruins, somehow surviving in small communities underground as long as there was still food to be scavenged somewhere, but those numbers were dwindling. Supplies running out, the bots or rivaling groups of humans killed more than were born. Justin saw these outsiders as both people they had to save and as unused potential. If they wanted to win this they all needed to work together.

Connor was doing his best to reach all of them, and Justin, Bob and the others were doing their best to help, but some were just too far away, too afraid or simply too selfish to join them. Selfish and stupid. They lived in little enclaves of comfort in the ruins and thought it would last forever, that somehow they would be the ones who'd be spared.

And then their enclaves disappeared and the number of people left alive dwindled further. Justin's fingers ran through the dust on a cabinet that contained nothing anymore but one single porcelain doll, right next to a bullet hole. The dust was oily and stuck to his gloves, staining them further.

A few hundred thousand hypothetical people were all that was left of the United States. And some of them (far too many) were trapped in work camps of the ones who had brought them down, forced to help along their own road to extinction. Because that was what they were facing. So few of them, so many machines, and the numbers of the bots were growing as much as the number of humans was tickling away. Skynet was winning – the fact that the machines allowed themselves to keep some enemies alive just to work from them said that more clearly than anything else. That, and this ghost town they were in, that looked like it could shelter people much better than most cities that were left and yet there was no one here.

“Colonel!” a voice called from further down the street. “They found the entrance to the bunker!”

“I'm coming,” he called back, turning away from the sight before him to hurry down to where Andrew was waiting for him. His old friend, who used Justin's former rank like a nickname and seemed to have been a part of his life for as long as he could remember, looked pale and haggard in the washed out light. This place was getting to him, too, as was the fact that they had had to bury Aaron just a week ago, along with three other soldiers who had died when a ruin they had been inspecting crumbled under their feet. Such a ridiculous, pointless way to die.

But maybe a victory in itself. At least they had managed to reach the end of their lives without the machines getting them.

There was very little humor in the thought.

Aaron had been twenty-five. He hadn't been a kid anymore – in fact, he had been much older than many of the newer additions to the 132th division. But Justin and Andrew had known him since he was a kid, and while they felt responsible for all the soldiers under their command, this had been different. Aaron had been family; they'd seen him grown up, and now they'd seen him die and everything sucked. They had started off with ten people, looking for Connor's army. Six had joined it twelve years ago. Now there were four of them left. Justin wondered if any of them would see the end of the war, if the war ever ended.

He was being morbid. Hardly surprising after the toll the past year had taken on their division and their friends, in this place, but something he needed to shake off. To lose hope meant to stop fighting and then the war truly wouldn't be won.

He followed Andrew down the street and then down an alley and into an old, derelict warehouse. This entrance to the bunker - they had found the main one inaccessible upon arrival – was in a back room: a hatch in the ground leading to stairs leading down to a heavy iron door about two stories beneath ground level. The door was open, which wasn't surprising considering the others had already come here. As they passed it Justin saw that it had not only been opened, it had been torn from its hinges.

They wouldn't find any survivors here.

And they didn't. The men of the 132th swarmed the corridors and the rooms, joining with the members of other divisions already here. Going deeper and deeper into the bunker, looking everywhere, but there was no one hiding in the closet, no crying infant beneath toppled furniture, having been hidden there by desperate parents. There was nothing, not even bodies. Bullet holes, though, and blood. The traces of fire.

And the smell. Burned flesh and hair, a hint of gas.

Justin wondered if all the people here had been killed or if the survivors of the desperate fight had been shipped off to the nearest camp. In that case many of them might still be alive. They could save them, then.

Which camp would they be taken to, though? With the one in Phoenix gone, Nevada would be the nearest that they knew about. A long way. Justin wondered if the machines had bothered, or if the lack of a useful application of these work forces anywhere near had driven the machines to just waste them. If so, by freeing the camp in Phoenix, the army had effectively sentenced these people to death.

This base had been small but well organized. Justin had had contact with several times before it had gone silent two months ago, had even stopped here for a few days to restock supplies on his way to Tucson before the Phoenix mission. The man leading the base, a guy called Wiliams, had been an asshole, but a capable one. When he'd been killed in action half a year ago he'd been replaced by a woman called Steel who, from what Justin could tell by their radio conversations, had been much like her name suggested but she had been as competent as Wiliams. She had been training new recruits when the base was lost. Now he wondered if any of them had managed to escape and scatter in the wasteland they had come from.

He passed the room he and his men had been staying in that one time, crowded together with the soldiers from the base because the place didn't have any extra room. Andrew had lost half a back of cigarettes in a card game the final evening, and Jessie had disappeared with a young woman from medical all night and had been moping for days after they moved on. More than anything Justin remembered the optimism that had permeated the place, between one major victory against a distribution center of the machines and the upcoming attack on the Phoenix camp. It had been a good time.

Now the room was empty. So was the next one, The one after that was the former command center. It was small, because the bunker was small and all they needed, Wiliams had argued, was a table to sit around and yell at each other. The table was still there now, but it was split in two, the halves having collapsed onto each other. Justin had no idea how that might have happened.

Connor was standing beside the table, holding a map together with Hernandez, his right-hand-man, for lack of any surface to spread it on. They looked serious. Others were standing around them, occasionally pointing at things on the map, while Hernandez mostly just frowned. He was, as always, wearing one of the dark gray jackets that served as a substitution for uniforms but with no rank insignia on them. As far as Justin was aware he didn't have a rank. Or a first name. Everyone still accepted his orders as long as Connor didn't contradict them.

Now neither Connor nor Hernandez seemed to be getting involved in the discussion, and Justin had a hard time figuring out if they were even listening to it or if they were both lost in their own observations. Connor could be very quiet for a long time, only to then come out with some input or a decision that seemed to come out of nowhere.

He looked up when Justin entered, so evidently he wasn't completely lost in thought. A nod of acknowledgment was all the commander of the 132nd got, but then, it was all he wanted. For a while he stood by and listened to the arguments being passed back and forth.

The original plan, months ago when this base was still active, had been to stop here on the way to moving the army's HQ to California. It had always been a difficult plan because this base was simply too small to house all of them and its permanent residents at the same time. Everything had to be moved in several trips: From Tucson to Yuma to San Diego. Just before they left Yuma they'd have informed Tuscon, and the next part of the army, escorting a number of civilians, would have come. And so on. It would have taken time and it would have been risky, but it was better than attempting the long way from Tucson to San Diego with everyone attached in one go.

Things had changed now, but not as much as one would think in the face of the fact that one of their most important stations on the way to their destinations had been wiped out. They'd still stop here because they had to, and because this city was still full of supplies that hadn't been looted yet. There would be no welcoming committee waiting for them; they would have to secure the base all on their own and make themselves comfortable, organize food and shelter. On the other hand there would be no other people to share the space with. The loss of so many allies meant that they would have to split into fewer groups to get everyone to California.

But it wasn't time for that yet, and it wasn't the only thing that needed a few decisions to be made. Justin thought the people talking around Connor were finally coming to a consent on when to move how many and how many to station here in case the machines came back, when Connor said, without taking his eyes off the map, “We're going to Page.”

Justin's heart sank. He wasn't even sure with what feeling – surprise, mostly, as this was something pretty much unrelated to anything happening in Yuma and the discussion going on. Also, he'd thought that Page was off the table for the time being, and while he had understood that it had been a difficult decision, it had been one he supported.

So he didn't like this, and not only because it hit him unprepared.

“When, Sir?” he asked, cautiously.

“After we dealt with the factory between here and Tucson.”

That part, Justin had already been aware of. They needed to get rid of that thing before any other plan could be put into action. “But before Las Vegas,” he said. It wasn't a question.

Connor looked him straight in the eye, in a way that told Justin the man was well aware what he was doing right now. “Yes.”

“Why? I thought we had decided that we would deal with the camp first, while there's still a chance.” That sounded a lot like criticism, but Connor never minded that. Still, Justin half-expected him to just point out that it was his decision as Commander of the Army and his men were not to question him. He didn't even know why, as that was very, very rarely the way Connor handled things. It wasn't now.

“We did, when it looked like the camp would be closed soon. It had been a strategically difficult decision based on the fact that it would be the last chance to save the lives of the inmates. Now the situation has changed. Reports have reached us that lately the camp in Nevada has received new inmates and new deliveries of bodies and garbage. We do not have confirmation of this yet but it seems that the machines have widened the area supplying that camp all the way to Yuma rather than opening a new one. There is no immediate danger of it being closed anymore.”

And so there was no immediate need to rescue anyone now. Justin said nothing in reply, because he saw the logic but it was hard for him to accept. People were suffering right now in horrible ways and they could go and save them and were just now making the conscious decision that they would not.

“Do you have a problem with that, Perry?” Connor asked him when he didn't answer. There was no challenge in it; it was an honest question, and Justin answered it honestly.

“Yes, Sir. But I can't deny the logic behind it.”

Connor nodded slowly. “I was hoping you'd see it that way.” He looked around. “Any other opinions?”

Now the question was rhetorical. Connor _was_ interested in other opinions, but Justin knew him well enough to know that he had made up his mind and nothing short of a miracle or groundbreaking new information would be able to change it.

If there were other opinions, no one voiced them. Nothing unusual there. Connor went on to explain their further proceedings: They would take over this base, wait until Colonel Marcey's division made it here and then go take out the machine distribution center just fifty miles east of Yuma. At this point, they had lots of experience with something like that and Justin didn't expect much trouble there, except that some soldiers would probably die because someone almost always died. Once that thing was out of the way and the area more of less secure they would start moving HQ. It would take weeks. In that time, they would have all available divisions in the area collect at a secondary base near Page and meet them there once they could.

It would be months from now before they could attack the oil field the machines had found and started harvesting between Page and Kanab a while ago. Preparation was crucial there because they didn't just want to take it from the machines, they wanted to take it for themselves, and that was what made it hard. The avoidance of destruction. Justin wasn't sure everyone here knew how to do that anymore.

If they succeeded, their lives would be a lot easier. When they finally, after licking their wounds and restocking their supplies, got to go for the camp, their chances of success would be higher. They would be quicker. Less people would be killed. By giving precedence to gas over human lives, they might end up saving lives that would have been lost otherwise. Justin still thought that the irony in that was rather bitter.

It didn't help that if the choice had been his alone, he would have made it just like this. Because he'd have had to. Getting a steady supply of gas would make them so much quicker, more mobile. The preservation of the very small supply they had featured into every decision they made at the moment. Missions had to be aborted due to lack of fuel, dangerous attacks against overly armed fortresses had to be carried out just because they were in such desperate need for the gas they were guarding that it could not be postponed or avoided. Several areas of the country simply could not be reached in a reasonable time and where therefore given up before anyone ever set foot there. Getting their own oil supply might just as well become a turning point of the war.

Right now, as Connor laid out the plan of action, Justin mostly just hoped that he would never again have to sit in a meeting discussing the failure of a mission and hear people mourn the loss of a few gallons of gas over the loss of lives.

  


-

  


Laina hated Kyle. He did understand that, even though he didn't know why. Before Alex became his friend he'd had no contact with her at all. They existed in the same world, and that was the extent of what they meant to each other. Laina hadn't been in the camp for long – no longer than Cecilia had. Looking back, Kyle thought he had seen them together a few times. It was only through Alex, who was Laina's friend as well, that Kyle learned Cecilia had been Laina's aunt.

To be in here with family, someone she loved and was loved by... Kyle wondered often if that made it easier or harder. When he'd been younger he had often wished his mom was with him, or his dad, and he had wished Alyssa was still around even though he'd only known her for a very short time. There would have been comfort in that, he thought, in a place that offered no comfort at all. But people you loved were people you could lose. Kyle was happy and grateful to have a friend in Alex. It made his life a little less miserable. But ever day the idea that me might die filled him with horror and made him wonder if it wouldn't be better not to care. If the comfort they could give each other was worth it.

That probably explained why Laina was so angry. Maybe it even explained why she was so angry with _him_. Cecilia had spend some of her final hours with Kyle, even if he barely remembered it. Her attention was precious and Laina had had to share it and then it was taken from her. Kyle thought maybe he understood that. He wasn't sure. He didn't mind Alex spending time with Laina, although he worried every time his friend was gone that he wouldn't come back. Those were the moments when he thought it wasn't worth it. When it hurt more than it helped and he thought that surely something bad would happen to Alex because something bad happened to everyone. Maybe Laina felt the same way when Alex was with Kyle and that was why she hated him so much.

Or maybe there was no reason that he could possibly figure out. Sometime people just hated.

If Kyle didn't have a friend in Alex, he wouldn't care how Laina felt about him. He wasn't sure he did care. There didn't seem to be a good reason for her feelings so there was nothing he could do to change them. It was just that, if she didn't avoid him so and got angry when Alex talked to him, they could all three be together when circumstances and the machines let them and neither had to be lonely and afraid.

Kyle had forgotten how horrible it all was until there were moments when it was not quite as horrible. This all made him feel so vulnerable and frightened. But it was the prospect of losing it that made it so bad and in the end it just made him feel conflicted.

He tried to blank his fears out the way Alex had taught him, but it was hard. Alex was much better at it. He never seemed to be afraid, always was in control. Maybe he didn't care as much. Kyle kind of envied him. And admired him. He tried to be more like his friend. Everyone would be better off if he were.

Maybe he'd even get to protect Alex then, until they got out of here.

He wondered how much longer that would take. Didn't allow himself to wonder if it would happen at all. Instead he assessed their chances. They were two of them now, three if they counted Laina, and that meant they could take care of each other if one got sick, hide the weakness from their metal guards the way Alex and Cecilia had when Kyle got sick last year. Keep each other from getting killed. Share their resources. A definite advance compared to what Kyle survived on for four years. Also, he was getting bigger, stronger. Not as quickly as he would have liked, but he no longer was as vulnerable as he'd been coming here, and Alex was nearly big enough to count as a grown up and not have to worry about anything but the machines. And they knew the place now, had been learning it for years. With every day they remained here they got better at surviving, even though every day could be the day they died.

Of course, they could also die outside the camp. It was even likely. But it would be different. The thought of going down fighting didn't scare Kyle. He just wanted a _chance_ to fight.

The sound of fighting was what drew his attention on this gray morning while he was sitting in front of a pile of stuff, sorting through it, trying not to cut his hand like the man last year who got an infection and was sorted out. He lifted his head to see what was going on, then looked down again trying to ignore it when he identified voices (male, human, not Alex) yelling at each other. He hoped they would stop soon, before the machines stopped them.

In his hands he held a can. No, not a can – something can-shaped that contained electronics of some kind. The kind of thing that the machines were interested in. Kyle took the tool he had been provided with and began to work open the cover, taking care not to damage the insides though they weren't functioning anyway. They were still so many workers in the camp that being sloppy could turn deadly very quickly.

There were words written on the cover. Faded blue. Beneath that more words, smaller, in fine back print. Kyle tried to make out the meaning. He recognized the L, the A, and most other letters of the big blue word, but couldn't make sense of it. The small ones were too many and he gave up after a brief glance. There were some short words he thought he identified but they were meaningless without context.

Or rather, they had a meaning, but it was closed to him. It was right there, but Kyle couldn't grasp it, forever remaining on the outside of whatever those words were trying to say. Sometimes Kyle felt those writings were like the fence.

Alex could read, at least a little. He had tried to teach Kyle the letters but even if he remembered the shapes and the corresponding sounds, it was almost impossible to apply meaning to them. Alex's disjointed attempts to explain how they flowed together and changed shape to from words that made sense had been lost on him and in the end Alex had stopped trying. Most kids couldn't read, he'd said. It was nothing to worry about.

Kyle just hoped that Connor would let him join his army even if he couldn't read. Sometimes the thought gave him nightmares. He tried to practice, but he had nothing to write on but dirt and more often than not, the letters he found on old packages and cans had no resemblance to the ones Alex had drawn into the snow last winter. Now he stared at the cover of the can-shaped electronics for half a minute before he put it away and moved to the next piece. The machines would notice if he lingered too long.

The fighting had stopped, at least. Kyle cautiously looked up but everything was calm and quiet. He tried to spot Alex but couldn't find him anywhere. He didn't even know where he was working today. Then the stench of decay assaulted his senses as a chard was wheeled past him. Full of bodies that had been lying around for a long time. He caught a glance at it, saw the decay and the nakedness of the people. Kyle hoped Alex wasn't among those who had had to strip them. There was hardly anything more unpleasant than that, and he thought it had to be dangerous, too, as he had seen many get sick afterward.

The wagon rumbled away and behind it he caught, for a moment, Laina's face, glaring at him from a gab in the group walking back to the Box where the fresh bodies were. The ones who hadn't been bodies when they got here. Kyle instinctively looked away, and when he looked up again, she was gone.

He got to work at the garbage pile until midday. It was one of his favorite work stations, if only because it didn't immediately have to do with death. But the pile he'd been assigned kept shrinking, the well-known fate of slow workers keeping him from lingering longer on any piece than he had to, and by the time the weak light started to get weaker still, he was done and send somewhere else.

This time it was sorting through the clothes taken from the dead. It was better than dealing with corpses, but not much. The weather was still cold enough to freeze everything that was exposed to it, and while that also included any human not careful or lucky enough, at least it kept the stench in check. It wasn't so bad yet, except the old corpses they'd gotten had been lying inside for a while, where it wasn't quite cold enough to keep them from rotting and reeking. Soon, the snow would melt and then it would get worse.

Kyle didn't know what month it was. He just knew that the year had turned a while ago but it was still before the brief time in the middle when it got warm enough for the snow to go away during the day. He had learned the names on the months before he came here and had retained them in his memory, sometimes listing them, like the weekdays, in his mind to distract it from other things, but they were meaningless now. Every day was the same. He only knew that another year had passed because the next Thaw was closer now than the last one had been and the days where notably longer. The year turned in the darkest, coldest time.

It didn't matter what year it was, but Kyle knew it was 2016 anyway. He was eight years old now. He knew that because he had been four, almost five when he came here in 2012. It had been after the Thaw, in the dark and cold time near the end of the year, and he'd known he would turn five soon, although now he no longer could remember how he'd known that. He no longer remembered the date, but he thought his mother must have talked about it before they'd tried to leave the city. (He liked to imagine that she always kept track of dates like that and marked them in the calendar and reminded them, him and his father, when they came around. But he didn't know for sure, and later it would fall away in the mental file he kept on his mother, neatly divided into facts he had on her, like the color of her hair, and things he'd never known or had forgotten, like her name.)

He didn't see Alex all day. It wasn't unusual – the camp was big and sometimes they ended up on different ends of it. Kyle still kept looking around, every now and then, to see if he caught a glimpse of his friend. He told himself he wasn't worried, but still always felt relief when he spotted him between the others people, living and dead.

Some days he saw him look at the fence and at the turrets with an expression on his face that made him afraid, because he had seen it on the faces of other people. And some of those people had tackled the fences and the turrets had taken them out. But Alex never did.

Today he wasn't looking at the fence when Kyle found him in the evening, after dark, in that brief moment when the need for food created something like a community in which they all sat together. After the fights for the best places around the fire pots and before the fight for leftover food. Kyle and Alex kept to the fringes, as usual. They sat side by side, eating in silence and in a hurry. Not talking. They rarely did.

But today Alex ate more slowly than usual, seemed to have to force himself to swallow every bite. He looked a little queasy and Kyle fought panic when he noticed that. Alex was sick, he thought. He was sick and that meant he would likely die.

In the end Alex set the bowl down before it was all empty. Kyle looked at the leftovers, his own stomach still feeling empty as it always did, and could only see the beginning of death inside. When Alex gave the bowl to him he insistently pushed it back into his friend's hands. “Eat,” he whispered. Alex shook his head but Kyle kept insisting until he gave in and ate another two or three bites, until there was hardly anything left.

“If I eat another bite I'll puke and it'll all go to waste,” Alex finally said. His voice sounded strange, all breathless and forced, and Kyle knew he was serious. He accepted the leftovers this time, got them down in a few seconds, and afterward he was still hungry.

They retreated quickly down. Kyle had been hoping to get a spot beneath one of the fire pots, where it would be warmer, but the one that was accessible from where they were was not accessible for Alex anymore. He'd grown too much to fit through the tight little shaft that led there, and Kyle wouldn't leave him alone while he was so obviously weak. Weak ones were liabilities to the machines, but right now, at night, more than anything else weak ones were easy targets. Kyle hoped no one had seen the state the other boy was in. He led him to one of his own favorite hiding places, off one of the solid tunnels far from the crate, and Alex never even protested, which worried Kyle even more. They huddled together, Kyle trying to provide some warmth now that the fire pots were out of question.

Alex drifted off soon enough but Kyle stayed awake, constantly keeping an eye on the mouth of darkness that was the only opening of their hiding place. It was too big; anyone could come here. If they did, Alex would surely die, and Kyle wouldn't let that happen. If anyone came he'd fight them, even if that would just mean he would get hurt and killed as well. He never considered not trying, he merely regretted that there probably would be no point.

Maybe Alex would be better by morning. Kyle hoped it. It was all he could do.

But Alex wasn't better by morning. He was dizzy, had to force himself to eat and got even less down than the night before. He was trying, though, and that meant he was still interested in being alive. He wasn't giving up. Kyle took that as a good sign. If Alex wanted to fight this, he would win. (At least that was what Kyle wanted to believe, what he told himself. Deep down inside he knew that will and strength weren't enough, having seen too many times that no one ever won in the long run.)

He helped his friend through the day as best he could, the way Alex had helped him in the previous year. He stayed close and made sure Alex at least _looked_ busy whenever a machine came close. He went through his own tasks as quickly as he could so he could take care of Alex's as well when he didn't get done with something in a reasonable time. It left him short of breath and dizzy, but he knew that if he failed Alex would die. Usually, Kyle wouldn't have stuck so close to the other boy, knowing that connections could and would be exploited, but today it was this or death.

When he had a second to catch his breath, Kyle glared at anyone looking in their direction as if his anger had any sort of power.

At night he paid the price for using up his energy like he had and for letting people see that he cared about someone. It made him miss the evening meal, which was bad because his reserves were already down to nothing. It also made him miss whether or not Alex had eaten enough, or at all. Kyle didn't even find him at first and panicked for a minute before he could get a hold on himself. Panic didn't help. Calling was out of the question. He systematically searched through the tunnels and did come across Alex soon enough, in one of the hiding places that were too close to the sleeping area to be popular with anyone.

He was curled up and trembling. Kyle draped himself over him, trying to provide some warmth. He even opened his own coat to better spread over both of them. He did not take it off to let Alex have it on his own; that wouldn't have helped much and it would just have made Kyle freeze to death, even down here. It was one of the first lessons anyone ever learned.

The next morning, he dragged Alex above ground against his protest. He made him eat, and when his friend gave up he made him eat more. Then Alex threw up and Kyle hurried to hide the mess, even before he ate what was left of Alex's ration, eager not to let it go to waste and to make up for the meal he had missed the night before. His body would need all the fuel it could get, he feared, and was right. Alex was even weaker then yesterday, dropping things often, mumbling under his breath and occasionally trying to send Kyle away. Kyle never went, but he couldn't avoid that they both got assigned corpse duty that day. Fortunately, they only had to take off clothes. He didn't think he could have carried dead bodies on his own.

No Cecilia came to help them.

Laina was seen in the distance every now and then, glaring at Kyle, looking at Alex full of concern, than glaring at Kyle again. As if it was his fault. Maybe she thought that Kyle didn't do a good enough job to help their friend, and she was certainly right if she thought that she could have done a better job, being taller and stronger, but she never tried. Apparently Kyle's presence kept her away. He thought about leaving to give her a chance to come and keep Alex alive, but never did. At least he _knew_ that he was trying to help, even if it was inadequate.

The day dragged on. Work was hard, Alex almost no help at all, and when he did try to do his share of the labor, Kyle had to save him from stumbling into the pit twice. The machines seemed to be closer than ever; it felt to Kyle that they were watching no one but them, waiting for one of them to give Alex's state away so they could shoot him. But somehow, the day ended and Alex was still alive. He walked to the containers under his own power, and there Kyle led him to the best hiding place that was accessible to them, stuffed him inside, and didn't take him along when the morning came with more work.

All he could do after that was provide his friend with two blankets, one bowl of food that Alex didn't touch, and the hope that the machines didn't notice his absence.

  


-

  


Something had gone wrong on the way between Yuma and Tucson. Something often did on long rides or tracks, and by now the machines had figured that the army was crossing this distance often. They did their best to keep the track clear and safe, but ambushes happened. Not as often now that the distribution center was gone, but there was no such thing as safety in this world. So people got killed. Some people got hurt. They ended up in Kate's clinic and Lou, abandoned by her sister for the afternoon, watched with big eyes as blood dripped down the operation table.

With as many strangers and unpredictable youths as they still housed in their HQ, Kate would rather have her watch this than have her be unwatched. She was angry with Jeannie for snaking away and wanted to go over and make Lou face the wall, but she couldn't let her daughter's presence distract her.

The man died anyway.

Afterward, there was a chance to organize things. Find a place to put the little girl where she would be watched and cared for. Kate spared a thought for all the mothers and fathers out in the main complex of the base, having it even harder than her to take care of their children. In relation to everyone else, her girls were having a pretty comfortable and sheltered childhood.

Li was pregnant. Kate silently vowed to help where she could and make sure her kid would be as well cared for by the staff of the clinic as Kate's own.

Once Lou was settled somewhere away from blood and suffering and Kate had made sure that she would get food if she was hungry, she ended up back in the main treatment room, now empty of anyone except Melissa, who was leaning against the table, half sitting on it, looking exhausted. The blood was gone. Melissa was very meticulous about that.

“Are you alright?” Kate asked her. While more gentle in nature, the former nurse had always handled losing patients more professionally than Kate felt she ever could, but lately, her old friend's reactions worried her. Kate didn't know exactly why, as there wasn't much of a reaction to be found. Something just seemed off. Wrong.

Melissa smiled tiredly from her distant land, than gave up even on that. “We fixed this boy before, just four weeks ago.”

“I remember.” The young man had been injured in the destruction of the distribution center. His wounds had gotten infected before he ever made it back here but it hadn't been so bad that the attempt to save him would have seemed pointless. So they had tried and he had pulled through, and now he was dead anyway.

“When he died today, the first...” Melissa shook her head, still with that mild, distant expression on her face. “The very first thought that went through my mind was how all that medication we used to save his life back then has been wasted. I was...” She seemed to be looking for the right word. “...irritated.” Which was more of an emotion that Kate had seen her show at all since their reunion.

“It _was_ a waste,” Kate said carefully. “And a pity. I thought the same thing.” It hadn't been the first thing that came to her mind, though. Maybe the third, or fourth. When she became aware just how diminished their supply of antibiotics had become again, and how soon they would have to venture into dangerous territory to got more, and how people would probably die for that.

What they needed to do was make their own, but so far all they managed was weak substitution. The very limited plant life left on the surface didn't help.

Their situation was desperate, one way or another. A large mission was planned, far from the base, and Kate and half her team would go there with most of their medication and bandages to deal with the expected injured and even if the team in Yuma found as of yet undiscovered stacks of pills in the city many soldiers would die who could have been saved had they had more supplies. To lose some of those supplies like this, by using them on someone doomed, was as frustrating as it was tragic.

Maybe the boy rescued some of his comrades before he was hit, or the mission would have failed without him. Kate always reminded herself of this possibility in cases like this and she never asked to make sure.

Either way, it didn't change the fact that the soldier had been barely older than the Wasteland and he'd died without ever knowing anything else. They had been able to give him a chance to see John's prophecied end of the war that everyone believed in so desperately, and he hadn't been able to hold on to it. That was something Kate tried not to think of at all.

“It's a tragedy,” Melissa said, matter-of-factly. “A young man died, a kid far from half my age, while fighting for all of us. I thought he had a chance and then he hadn't. Once, I would have cried for him, instead of cursing him for wasting our effort.” Seeing the expression on Kate's face, she added, gently, “Oh, I would have been sneaky about it. There's no time for emotions where lives are on the line, but I think when I got a break I would have shed a tear for him, and the others like him that I didn't know. I like to think that I would have.” Her expression turned distant again, though no less gentle. “I think I used to be a pretty good person.”

“You still are,” Kate insists. “You saved so many lives since you came back here, despite everything that's been done to you. Not everyone is able to do that, to even try.” Hesitatingly, then with courage when the other woman didn't resist, she took Melissa's hands in hers and admitted, “I still want to be you when I grow up.”

“Oh Katie,” Melissa answered. There were tears in her eyes, like a sign of life. “Don't say that. Don't ever say that.” But she was smiling through those tears; it seemed to be the same smile as before but for the first time since they started talking (maybe for the first time since 1998) the smile was directed at Kate instead of going nowhere, and perhaps that counted for something, after all.


	10. 2016 - 2/3

The winter had been hard. People had died by the dozen, freezing, getting sick. Some couldn't handle the small rations of food handed out, especially when others took them from them, and they grew weak and then they were killed.

Being bigger now, Alex had taken to sleeping in his assigned bed every now and then, when the machines rolled through the lines at night to scan them and see if everyone was in their spot. They always did it early at night and never more than once in two weeks and when he'd been younger Alex would wait until it was over, then slip away and hide. Now he sometimes stayed, hoping for the best. There was some warmth here, residue of the fire pots, that was lacking in the tunnels where it was always damp and one always ran a risk of missing the wake-up-call.

If Alex had been alone, he would have gone to bed on the fist day he felt really bad and not gotten up in the morning, and then the machines would have taken care of him. There had been no energy left in him to care, but now that he was getting just that little bit better the thought scared him. He had come so close to dying, to becoming one of the bodies in the hole. He was still close to dying, still weak, still hurting, still unable to work. But he had regained his ability to be afraid.

He had lost track of time, but thought he must have been down here, in the tunnels, for two or three days because of the number of bowls waiting for him when he became aware of his surroundings again. Kyle had brought them down here, no doubt – one per day, at night, as it was impossible to get back here and up again in time after the morning feeding. One of them was only half full, evidence of his little friend's own burning hunger. Alex wished he had eaten all of that, or better yet not taken the risk of getting more than his own share. People got killed for that. But then, Kyle had managed to survive here for much longer than anyone would think and Alex was not surprised.

Just concerned. He didn't want to be the thing that finally killed him.

His fever broke some time around midday. It was silent above him, the only sound that of the wind blowing through the underground tunnels. Alex didn't feel much of it. He was in a good place, protected from the icy breeze. But too tight for him to move much. One of Kyle's places, obviously – maybe the same one the kid had survived in last year when illness had nearly claimed _him_. Not enough space for two people to fit and yet Alex had vague memories of a smaller body against his and the additional warmth it offered. Kyle must have lain right in the opening of the cavity, blocking Alex from both the wind and the view of anyone happening upon them.

His little protector. Alex closed his eyes, overcome by both fondness and despair. Then he dragged himself out of the gab between metal and metal, his potential coffin, on weak limps and saw the bowls.

He did not feel hungry and the thought of eating held no appeal to him. But food kept in this weather and with luck, he would be able to get some of it down later. Maybe he would even be able to go up there and prevent Kyle from taking the risk of getting more for him. Though maybe there would be no need. Kyle would know that if Alex ever ate again, what was here already would do for a while. Perhaps he had even stopped bringing more days ago, in which case Alex had no way of telling the time after all.

Judging by the quality of the light falling through the crate, he still had hours before everyone else would come back. For a while he lay on his back, staring up, waiting for his heart to calm down. In a way, being sick had been nice. It had stopped him from caring. He had not missed the fear and the worry.

A distant gunshot. Someone had just died. Alex closed his eyes, thought of Kyle, of Laina, then of his family. He drifted.

Awareness returned when the light was fading. The cold that had been kept away by the heat of his body was now seeping into his bones and he reached for the blankets, wrapped them around himself with trembling fingers. For a while he stared at the bowls. Eventually he took the one that was already half empty and tried to finish it. He couldn't, but he got down some and it stayed down. Maybe he would live. If he recovered quickly enough and luck continued to be on his side.

Night fell and he heard the silent procession of feet walking all over him. Quiet voices. Nothing going on, no excitement while he'd been gone, nothing devastating of hopeful. Alex closed his eyes again and swallowed the despair. Despair was not an emotion that could be used as fuel; it crippled and it killed. He had not survived his illness for this, although he didn't know, right now, if he had survived it for anything at all.

Or if he had, indeed, survived. The next day would tell. He lay in the dark, listened to the noises that formed the outlines of the world he lived in, and waited for Kyle to come.

It took a long time. Alex was cold, trembling now, and hungry without the energy to eat. He was convinced, for a long time, that he was dying after all, and Kyle didn't come, which could mean a lot of things, and none of them were good. Maybe he was dead. Maybe that gunshot had been meant for him. Alex could lie here in the cold dark until he died without ever knowing. Perhaps Kyle had just been delayed, or he had given up on Alex. Alex had tried to teach him how to keep everything at a distance, how not to care. Now the thought that he might not was terrifying.

Kyle didn't come. At one point he was just there, helping Alex up and wrapping the blankets more securely around him. “Where did you get these?” Alex asked, grabbing at the worn fabric. Out here, the wind was a little more of a bother, but he could not bear the thought of crawling back into that hiding spot.

Two blankets. Kyle had not frozen to death so he had not given Alex his own. Good. Good. He worried sometimes.

“One's yours,” Kyle reminded him. “Grabbed the other one when some guy didn't move in the morning. One of the new ones,” he added, telling Alex that it was probably not someone he knew well enough to care one way or another that he was gone.

Come to think of it, this was exactly what he would have expected had he actually been able to think about it. Kyle was not someone to steal from the living, and he probably wouldn't be even if he weren't tiny and stood a chance, because in a place where no one had more than the absolute necessary the loss of _anything_ could be fatal. (Alex worried about him. People made it sometimes without being total bastards but the bastards had it easier.) But he was resourceful and quick, and, knowing that he needed more warmth for his friend, had probably kept an eye on the state of everyone so he could make his move before anyone else could grab the precious blanket off that fresh corpse.

“Anything happen?” Alex asked, taking the bowl Kyle handed him and trying to work up the energy to eat – he had the appetite now.

“Nothing much. No new deliveries.”

That was good. Last summer there had been so many people fit for work picked up in the streets of the wider Los Angeles area, that the machines had constantly sorted through the inmates of heir camp, using stricter and stricter requirements as guidelines. But the winter had been hard on anyone everywhere, apparently. The people delivered were often close to death already; only few were turned into living additions to the camp, and the numbers already here thinned out. It had probably saved Alex's life. The machines weren't actively looking for weaknesses right now.

“How's Laina?” Kyle would probably have told him if anything had happened to her, but not necessarily at once, and Alex was worried _now_.

Kyle shrugged – a good sign. “I saw her today. She's no different.” He sounded indifferent, and why wouldn't he be? Kyle and Laina were not friends and they never would be. Kyle knew she hated him and accepted it without asking why, and Alex would never tell him that he knew the reason or what it was. Things worked this way. He had never wanted to have friends in here but while he wished the ones he did end up with were able to be in the same spot together, he was glad that at least everyone was settled into the way things were.

He had seen things play out differently in the many years he had been here. He had seen kids not much older than Kyle kill each other (or at the very least cause each other's death) over rivalry for the attention of other kids or the few adults who had time for them and who's attention brought anything but terror. Affection was a good as precious and vital as food or warmth for some. It was better not to need it.

Kyle leaned against him after they finished eating and draped his own blanket over both of them. There were two more bowls waiting untouched beside Alex and he coaxed his friend into eating from one of them. It wasn't hard. They had to be returned soon anyway, or the machines were bound to notice at some point. They were stupid, but they could count.

“You came late,” Alex finally observed, when he couldn't seem to fall back into the sleep that had held him so securely for days and Kyle kept shifting around as if unable to find a comfortable position. “Did they do a count?”

“Wasn't there for it, but they wouldn't. Last one was two days ago.”

There was a lot of information in there, but except for a habitual feeling of dread, Alex couldn't make sense of that yet. His head hurt and his voice sounded like nails on sandpaper and felt like it, too. The one, very clear thing he got from Kyle's word left him with icy horror that overshadowed anything else. “I wasn't there,” he realized.

“No. Don't worry. They didn't do a kill-search, and I made sure they didn't find you.”

The tunnels were how the young ones survived here, and the machines left them alive for a reason, or so Alex believed. As much as he hated that reason, it meant that the machines didn't care so much if they hid at night. But they were stupid, following very simple patterns. Every inmate had a bed assigned to them, identified to the machines by the bar code burned into their arms. When they scanned the camp at night they noted which beds were empty, checked if they were currently supposed to be occupied, and then searched for the missing workers. If those workers were found trying to escape they were killed. If they were not found at all and showed up later after not having been at work for a day or two, they were killed, too. A worker who did not work was a useless worker. That could have been Alex.

But the bots send into the tunnels to drag out those hiding there were small and didn't care to match the bar code with the empty beds. If two beds were empty and two people were found in hiding, they were satisfied and left everyone else alone. Kyle making sure that Alex wasn't found probably meant that he'd left the bed he never used anyway when the machines started their search and made sure they found _him_ instead. Kyle didn't know it but Alex had done the same for him once, on a whim, before they ever exchanged words. If had been when Kyle was still unregistered and Alex had to make sure the machines found someone before they happened upon that little boy. Looking back he probably needn't have bothered, as said little boy had been pretty good at hiding.

“Laina wasn't there either,” Kyle added, like an afterthought. She had already been hiding then, which didn't make Alex feel any better, even though he already knew the girl was still okay. “And someone messed up the knee of the guy with the scar.”

That was good news for once. Scar Face, whose real name Alex never bothered to remember, was someone who wouldn't be missed when the machines sorted him out for being damaged, least of all by people who were small and weak, like Kyle, Laina – or Alex himself, although he was getting bigger and hadn't been bothered by that guy lately. Apparently he had picked a fight with someone else who was getting too big or too desperate for him. Finally.

Alex hoped whoever it was had gotten away unscratched. They'd done the world a service.

They fell silent and let the night pass. It was at the same time too long and too short. Alex slept restlessly and he wasn't sure Kyle slept at all. His thoughts remained disconnected and jumbled, and whenever he woke from his disjointed nightmares, he was almost disappointed that it wasn't morning yet. He wanted to move. Everything hurt and somehow he felt that movement would make it better.

But morning finally came just after he had fallen into the first deep sleep of the night. It was the signal that woke him, jerking him awake to a pounding head and limbs that felt like they were filled with lead.

He had sunken down and was now using Kyle as a pillow while also pulling him close like a stuffed teddy bear. It was an oddly comfortable way to wake up – so close to someone he trusted to fall asleep around, and who trusted him enough to do the same. Kyle was warm, but like a skeleton wrapped in cloth, and Alex knew he was the same, all sharp angles and bones poking into every vulnerable spot they could find. It wasn't all that comfortable physically, it was just better than being cold and alone.

The fact that they both woke with a start and in Kyle's case with a muffled sob spoiled things a little.

When Kyle climbed up to grab some food and then work, Alex left with him, even though Kyle tried to make him stay down for another day. Now he was feeling a little better, thinking a little clearer, the hiding place felt like a trap. Since the summer of overpopulation, the machines had taken to occasionally searching through the tunnels during to day to pull out anyone hiding inside instead of working and executing them. It had been dumb luck that none of those sweeps had happened while Kyle had been so ill.

Besides, Alex wanted to see Laina and make sure she was doing alright. It wasn't that she needed him to get by, or that he didn't trust Kyle's word on her being okay, but he would find some peace of mind seeing her unharmed with his own eyes. It had been easier when he'd been all alone but there was no going back to that now. And having a reason to get up and resume his life wasn't so bad. (It would be bad if that reason was gone. That thought was constantly at the back of his mind.)

He was still shaky on his legs, but could keep up pretenses when he had to. Kyle, he noted halfway through the morning, was lingering nearby, keeping an eye on the surroundings with that focused way he had. Around noon, he signaled Alex to look fit because an entire bulk of machines was going past them. They paid no attention to the workers, disappearing in on the of the low buildings at the edge of the camp instead, in the areal no human was allowed to enter or wanted to.

Shortly after that he found Laina. She looked relieved to see him, waved briefly, then ducked away to a work station outside his field of vision. Hiding, even during the work hours. That wasn't good. Alex looked around to see if he could identify whoever it was she was trying to avoid, but saw nothing but half a dozen potential candidates. Briefly after that, the thought penetrated the hazy wall still surrounding his mind that even if he did know who threatened her, there was basically nothing he could do about it.

At the same time he lost sight of Kyle, who had been ushered away to the other side of the Hole. For half a day he was on his own, or thought he was. He'd just started regretting not hiding in the tunnels for another day when he heard a brief whistle and spotted Laina's dark braid between pile of garbage just before he spotted the bulk of machines coming back their way.

The night took its time coming and when it did, Alex had never been more relieved. This time, he would not have trouble finding sleep, he thought. First he needed to find food, though – he was ravenous – and his friends.

Laina found him first. She didn't talk much but stayed close. Alex felt better with her by his side. There was a certain safety in numbers, even if the number was only two. He was tall enough for his age to usually be left alone, but he was also weak right now and therefore easy pickings. Laina was obviously scared, more so than he had ever seen her. Together they were two half-grown kids strong enough that any sensible person would think twice about picking them.

Which mean they would pick someone else. Plenty of kids around. Alex wished Kyle was here but the younger boy didn't show his face and he wouldn't as long as Alex was with Laina.

“While we were gone, the bots did a sweep of the tunnels,” Laina finally said, after they had managed to grab some food. Alex's bowl was only half full and he felt like crying at the sight. “Found Marc and two of the girls who came with the last delivery, though I think one of them was dead already.”

The information was enough to distract Alex from his hunger for a moment. (There were still two bowls waiting for him at the hiding place anyway.) So going to work _had_ saved his life today. He thought about Marc, a boy of ten or eleven years who had been here almost as long as Kyle had. Hostile and aggressive towards anyone he figured he had a chance against, he had stolen Alex's blanket once and nearly killed him, had tried to bash in his head for his shoes. Alex remembered him arriving here, scared and crying. He'd learned how to survive quickly enough, until he didn't. Alex wouldn't miss him, nor the two girls he hadn't known. “I didn't hear any gunfire.”

“They weren't shot,” Laina told him. She looked away, which told him more. Nothing good.

“What did the bots do?”

“Dragged them to the building.”

Alex shuddered involuntarily. The Box had been used a lot during the summer when there were so many people. Before that, it hadn't been used in a year because there hadn't been, and it didn't make sense to use it now. “Why?” he asked. “So they'll starve?” It had happened at least once before, two years ago, when there had been enough people to fill the Box but not quite enough for them to crush each other to death. The doors had been shut behind them and not been opened for several days. Alex had been one of those send in to clear out the pile of bodies, and the stench had nearly killed him. It was the smell he remembered best, followed by his distant envy for the infant with the broken neck who had been too young to understand.

“No, not that building. The other one, at the end of the complex. With the low roof.”

Alex stared at his friend for a while, his mind trying to form images that would help. He knew the building but hadn't found it to be of any significance until now. “Why? What for?”

Laina stared back at him, then took a deep breath. “I forgot. It started when you were already sick. The sick and weak ones aren't shot right now, they are taken there. I don't know what the bots want with them. We haven't seen any of them again. But, you know. Heard the bots are doing something to them.”

“Doing what?”

She shrugged. “Experiments?” she offered. “I heard they are trying to find better ways to kill everyone like gas or viruses.”

“You believe that?” Alex asked incredulously. It sounded pretty stupid to him. “Why take people who are already sick for that?”

“Beats me. You got a better idea? Think they are trying to find a cure for their illnesses?”

A few weeks ago, Alex had found out that Laina didn't know what the word “sarcasm” meant. That didn't mean she didn't know how to use it.

“I think people talk a lot when there is nothing else to keep them entertained. They know nothing so hey make shit up.”

“So what? The machines never do anything without a reason, so they must do _something_ to them. Testing diseases sounds more likely than turning them into fellow bots.”

Alex snorted. “That came up, huh?”

Laina nodded, her face very solemn. “Some say they mean to wear our skin as a disguise.”

Alex snorted. He was still feeling miserable, but he wasn't dead yet and it was nice to know that people still had some sense of humor.

  


-

  


Alex's improved mood didn't last for long. He returned to the tunnels hungry to find that someone had taken the bowls left behind in his hiding spot and emptied them. Maybe Marc, or the girl that had been still alive when the bots got them. In that case the food was not only lost to him, it had also been fucking wasted.

Muddy traces barely visible in the weak shimmer of a nearby fire pot confirmed Marc's presence here. The uneven trail made by oversized boots was one giveaway, but the hand prints around the edge of the gab that had sheltered Alex during his illness were an even better tell due to the missing ring finger on the right hand. Marc had never had one as long as Alex could remember. It was the one thing that he had noticed about the boy, before Marc tried to steal from him for the first time. He'd been vaguely surprised that the bots ignored that injury, but it hadn't hindered the boy at all and the winter he arrived had been meager when it came to the human harvest.

Now he was gone, and all Alex felt, if he felt anything at all, was relief that it hadn't been someone he liked. In fact, with Marc gone, there would be one less person to keep an eye out for. There already were more than enough of those.

Alex wondered if it had been here that Marc had been taken, right where he himself had lain helpless for so long, with only an eight-year-old as an occasional protector. It didn't matter; either way, Marc's intrusion alone had destroyed any sense of safety he might have connected with the place, and the theft of the food he had been looking forward to left him with a familiar feeling of despair. He would not sleep here tonight.

Laina was waiting for him at the mouth of the tunnel, where it crossed another one. Alex had hoped to find Kyle, and while there were many places to get lost in here and sometimes they barely saw each other for days, he would have felt better if he had. Laina wouldn't. She was probably as relieved as Alex was concerned that the boy wasn't here.

“No food, then?” she asked when he came back, surprising him. He had not mentioned the extra food, not wanting her to be disappointed if it was gone. He sometimes forgot that she was not an idiot. Of course she'd seen the empty bowls before he had, and she might have seen Kyle get them in the first place. Maybe she even got them herself – it was possible; after all, Alex didn't remember anything. But he had a vague recollection of Kyle's presence and none of hers, and if she had been there Kyle would probably have mentioned it.

“Marc was faster.”

She grimaced. “Awesome. Way to waste a meal.”

“Such is life.” There really wasn't more to say about it. Such _was_ life. Until it became death, that was. “You know a good place to sleep?”

Laina eyed him for a second and he could feel her hesitation. Curious. She didn't usually mind sharing space with him at night and the body heat was nice for both of them. Finally, she nodded. “It's tight. Hard to reach, especially for you. I'm not going to sleep anywhere else.”

“If I can't make it, I'll find another place for myself.” If it was hard to reach for him, it would be near impossible for a fully grown man. It was obvious that Laina would not give up that protection for him and Alex would not ask her to.

He could make it, though. It was hard – the spot Laina had chosen for the night was not that small, would have offered room for three, maybe even four, which was usually more room than any of them wanted – but it was accessible only through a narrow pipe high in the tunnel wall. Being almost too big to fit inside, it was difficult for Alex to lever himself up, and the bottom of the pipe was wet and slippery, but as soon as he made it in, the slimy surface helped him slide along.

The wetness didn't even go all the way through his clothes. Small mercies.

Alex hadn't been in this part of the tunnels in years but his sense of direction told him that they were near the latrine, and the smell confirmed it. The pocket of metal they were hiding in was low and on a high level, directly underneath the crate. It made Alex feel exposed despite the difficulty of reaching this place. In winter, the water of the snow that thawed in the sleeping quarters flowed through that pipe and this chamber, making it accessible only a few short weeks out of the year. If the wind came from the wrong direction it got right in here. Laina couldn't have chosen a more uncomfortable spot.

Alex's thoughts kept wandering back to the muddy hand prints around his old sleeping place. Marc had been there not half a day ago and now he was gone and, if he was lucky, dead. Alex hadn't even liked the guy, he didn't mind him having been killed, but it got him thinking. All too easily, that could have been him. It might still be. The machines, or illness and starvation, or a dumb accident, or one of the Marcs and Scar Faces in the camp might get him at any time. He hoped it would be quick, without him having any time to be afraid, but mostly he hoped it would happen to him before it happened to any of his friends. Selfish, he knew. He just wanted to go out with them alive and with a chance to make it. A chance that would be greatly compromised by his passing. The previous few days had shown that: Alex would be dead if it hadn't been for Kyle looking out for him at work and taking care of him afterward. Just like Kyle would probably have died without Alex and Cecilia last year.

“Listen,” he said to Laina. “I know you don't like Kyle, but I want you to make peace with him if I die.”

She looked at him, startled and annoyed. “No,” she decided. “And you're not dying right now.”

“But I might tomorrow. Or the day after.”

“So might I. Or Kyle.”

“Yeah. But our chances are better if we stick together and protect each other. I'd be dead now if it wasn't for him. If you die, I'll still have him. If he dies, I still have you. But if I die you won't have anyone and then you'll probably die, too.”

“You'll be dead. What do you care?”

“I'll make me feel better.”

“No, it won't!” she snapped. “You won't feel anything. That's what being dead means. There'll be _nothing_ and you _won't care_.”

There was a lot of bitterness in her words. She was thinking of Cecilia, no doubt, and probably of other people she had lost. Alex recognized the tone. “I'm caring now,” he said quietly. “So promise me. I'm not asking you to be friends, just to help each other out.”

“You think baby face would agree to that?” she asked petulantly.

Alex nodded. “Yes.” He had no doubt about that. He'd still have to get around to asking, though.

Again Laina looked at him darkly, but this time the darkness was of another nature. “I would have helped you, you know?” she suddenly said. “But I didn't have to because he was always there.”

Now it was on Alex to be surprised. He hadn't expected her to bring that up. “I don't blame you,” he said, since that was where she seemed to be going with this.

“I just want you to know,” she said, not looking at him and sounding younger than he had ever heard before. More like the child she would have been in another life, the one his parents had told him about. “I would've helped you. I care. But I had someone watching me all the time and I would've led him right to you and he would have killed you.”

“It's okay.” Alex barely knew what to say. He actually hadn't thought Laina would go out of her way to help him if there was no immediate need for it, nor did he feel betrayed that she hadn't. It just wasn't something people did.

And yet she seemed to feel guilty over this. How strange.

A noise at the other end of the pipe drew his attention and spared him having to come up with a reply. Dread and apprehension jolted through Alex's feverish body as he tensed and strained to see who or what was there. They had spoken quietly, but if anything was looking for them they would still have given their position away. He thought of Laina's stalker, of the barracks at the other end of the camp that Marc and those girls had ended up in and hoped that whatever it was was both too large to fit through the pipe and not very patient.

It was dark on the other side, but he still managed to make out a silhouette with long tossled hair. Human, then. And not very tall. More like tiny. Alex released the breath he'd been holding. The other one was small enough to fit through the pipe but too small to be a threat. Peering inside their little open cave, either looking for a hiding place or looking for Alex. Seeing Laina, kid breathed a quiet “Oh” and turned to leave.

“Kyle,” Alex called after him. “Come here.”

Beside him Laina stiffened. She didn't say anything, because she made a point, somehow, of never doing anything in Kyle's presence that would acknowledge him. Alex hoped this wouldn't make her leave, but he doubted it.

She still hadn't made any promises. If she stayed, he wouldn't need to hear them.

Kyle hesitated, but eventually turned and climbed into the pipe. Alex reached out to help him up and could see the boy eying Laina cautiously when he finally settled against him under the crate. He could also see something else, that stood out on Kyle's pale face, in his light hair. Hair that should have been covered by a warm cap but wasn't.

He touched the side of his friend's face and his hand came back wet. “What happened?”

He could feel Kyle shrug rather than see it. “Just...” He shrugged again. “Someone. She had a stone.”

The explained the blood running down from the kid's temple. Held in hand or thrown? It didn't really matter. Someone had attacked Kyle and could just as well have killed him. For his cap, or for some other reason? Again, it didn't matter. This could have ended worse and Alex felt anger rise in him, thinking of the words he had exchanged with Laina just now. But the anger went nowhere. This was just what life was like.

“You still got your stuff?” Alex asked instead. He noted that the boy was carrying a blanket under his arm but didn't know if it was the one assigned to him at his bed every night or if he had taken it elsewhere. If a blanket was not returned there by morning, there would simply not be another one the next night. That was the reason why they didn't store them in the tunnels usually – unless they were wrapped round someone sick, of course. The risk of them being taken by someone quicker was too great.

Kyle nodded. “Most of it.” He settled against Alex and drew the blanket over both their legs. Alex extended his end over Laina's as well and his own blanket over their shoulders. They had to snuggle close for it to cover them all but that was alright with him. More warmth that way.

For a while there was silence. Not a lot of sound came to them from above, just, at some point, the footsteps of someone slowly making their way to the toilets.

Usually, people hurried. Slowly meant weak meant soon to be dead.

Eventually, the person walked away again and silence fell once more. Alex tried to relax into it, only Laina's unspoken hostility keeping him from truly enjoying this moment with both people he still cared about building a warm cocoon around him.

There still was something comfortable about the setting. It brought a memory to the surface of Alex's mind, but he needed a moment before he could grasp it. When he could, his father's voice flooded through his mind, so strongly Alex could almost remember what it had sounded like. Talking about the time before the war, when he'd been a kid himself and he would sit with his family after school, and over dinner they would ask each other about the events of their individual days. Long ago. The stories never contained any robots. Instead they were filled, according to Dad, with homework, school yard fights, annoying bosses and traffic jams. Things Alex could barely imagine, no matter how vividly his parents had conjured the images of their past.

While his dad's family sat around talking, the television would run, showing the news and then cartoons. Alex knew what a television was. He had seen enough of them even before he ended up in this place where stripping them of their insides was one of the best jobs to get on any given day. But he had never actually seen one in action and had a hard time making sense of his parents' tales. Moving pictures and sounds. Okay, he got that. He understood how it had worked, even. He just couldn't _see_ it.

“How did your day go?” he heard himself ask. Grinning at his own inside joke. Both Laina and Kyle shifted to stare at him because his question was so damn nonsensical. It made him grin even harder.

“Besson talked about Connor's army again,” Kyle bust out. “I overheard in the food line. He says they are coming to California.”

On Alex's other side, Laina shifted. She didn't say anything, though. Listening. It was Alex who asked, “How would he know that? Did the new ones tell him?” Then it was old news already, which might just mean that the army was even closer than it had been when they heard of it. Against his will and better judgment, his heartbeat sped up.

“Think so. Who else?”

People could make stuff up. Kyle and him, they couldn't be the only ones hanging on to hope here. And in the absence of facts, stories weren't questioned like they should be. Kyle certainly didn't seem to be questioning this. “Even if they do come here, it could still be a long time till they make it,” Alex cautioned.

“But there hasn't been anyone new here in weeks. If the info's that old, Connor must be even closer already.” That was Laina, voicing what Alex himself had thought not a minute ago. Her willingly participating in a conversation Kyle was part of, even if she spoke to Alex, was pretty telling. She had hope, too. So much hope, left and right of Alex, pinned on a single name, belonging to man they had never seen. The fragility of it was unsettling.

Alex hoped, too. He hated to be the voice of reason, but in this instance he felt that his two companions were, above anything else, young. They were freaking kids. Or at least, in another world, they would have been. “And you think the bots will just let them walk in here and take us with them? In all this time we heard of two camps like this that they freed. There must be dozens of them. So they will take ages to get to this one and help us, if they come at all. They might fail, too, and just get killed trying, or end up here as well.”

“One way or another,” Kyle insisted, “they are one day closer than yesterday.” If they were still around at all. Alex wondered if that part of the message had found any resonance in his young friend. But that was a stupid thought – it hadn't. And it shouldn't. If hope was all these kids had to keep going, who was he to taint it for them?

Not that he had. Kyle wouldn't allow his words to have any effect on him until they were proven correct. Clinging to the one thing he had and blanking out everything else with single minded focus. It was something Alex almost admired about the kid. A kind of resolve that he himself often found hard to maintain in the face of the bleakness that was every day.

“I hear that Kansas is all free of machines now,” he conceded. It was probably not true, but he also didn't really know where Kansas was. Probably very far away, so it didn't matter. “Maybe we can go there when we get out of here.”

“No.” Kyle settled against him again, getting comfortable. “I wanna fight.”

So did Alex, if he was honest to himself. But he also wanted to live, and he wanted the prospect of not being afraid for either his own life of that of his friends. (He didn't know what Laina wanted, except get out of here.) “Why?”

“Because I can,” Kyle replied, as if that was obvious. And it was. They couldn't do anything now. Had to let the machines do to them whatever they wanted. Once they _could_ do something to fight back, they would.

And, yeah, Alex would probably be there, too. For a while. Maybe all the bots would be smashed to bits in no time and then they _all_ could find some peace. Maybe they'd even get the televisions running again. Yeah. Right.

“I wanna help Connor,” Kyle added after a moment. He sounded calm, almost sleepy, but so damn determined. And that name again. So much loyalty to a guy they couldn't even know for sure was real, just because he was leading the fight against their oppressors and might be on the way to save all of mankind. Which, okay, was kind of awe-inspiring. Still, Alex could only hope that the man would live up to the expectation.

“You might not even ever meet him,” he pointed out.

“Still gotta do what I can,” Kyle answered, quieter now. “I wanna do my part.”

If only he got that chance. Alex hoped desperately that Connor got his army here quickly, before it was too late. Because this little boy leaning against him had the potential to be a soldier he wouldn't want to miss out on. So loyal to Connor already, and loyal to his friends, and determined and driven, and resourceful in desperate situations. Just waiting for his chance. Alex just hoped – for Connor's sake should Alex make it, too – that he wouldn't be used up as cannon fodder as soon as he got out of here.

From the other side of him, there came a quiet “Yeah,” of agreement. So quiet that Kyle probably couldn't hear it. It was meat for Alex anyway, or maybe for Laina herself. It shouldn't have been a surprise, and after a second Alex realized that it wasn't. She hated the machines, too. Even more than she hated Kyle, and with more substance to it, since in this case she actually had a reason.

Alex tried to think of something to reply, to give his opinion on all this, but apart from a distant flutter of excitement that he couldn't fight in the face of these kids' stubborn belief that their time in this camp was actually finite, he got nothing. So he settled down into the warmth coming from both sides and fell asleep. In his dreams, for once, there were no fences.

  


-

  


Things went to shit faster than expected. Justin had known they would go to shit, but he hadn't thought it would happen this quickly. It took him by surprise. It took all of them by surprise. Even Connor.

Justin could hear the General give commands over his comm. Loudly, but not yelling. So goddamn calm even now. He barely listened to them. Heard the word “retreat” in there and that was enough for him, merely confirmed what he was already doing. His unit's position had been overrun; he had made the decision to get the survivors out before there would be no survivors left without his commanding officer's okay. Presumably, Connor would appreciate the avoidance of the pointless sacrifice of good soldiers. If not, he could just go fuck himself.

Naya let out a scream of pain as Justin pulled her over a block of fallen debris. The situation had blown up around them far too quickly. They all had expected to meet resistance at the refinery, but not so much, not so early. Not so well hidden exactly where they had planned to attack.

From the moment the first shot had been fired from the shadow of an alcove that according to their intelligence shouldn't contain any machines, Justin had had the thought “trap” running through his mind. The bots had known they were coming and from where exactly. He had no time to dwell on that, though, his attention on the men and women of his team falling back beside him, firing into the smoke they were leaving behind to keep the fire off their leader and the burden that kept him from using his gun.

He didn't see Andrew anywhere. Mildred should be in the rafters, out of harm's way. Bill and Inez to his right, Caroline to his left, and he had seen Jack, Ramirez and Eliot run out before the explosion occurred and Naya screamed in pain and rage. He gripped her harder around her chest, dragged her faster. Inside the smoke he could see movement; just seconds now before the machines would come out of it and start actually hitting them with their bullets instead of just firing in their general direction.

And before the smoke, almost reached by the hungry tongues of the fire spreading out, Anderson on the ground. Trying to crawl away, calling for help. Justin grit his teeth. He had seen the man on the ground, injured but alive, when he had gone in to grab Naya. He could have saved him instead. He couldn't have taken both at once.

And he began to accept that he couldn't _save_ both, period. He had told himself that once Naya was out of the line of fire he'd go back for the older soldier, or send one of the others. Foolish. There was no time. The machines were almost past that line of flames and smoke and once they were, it would be too late. Not just for Anderson.

“Stevens, you still got your charge?” he yelled over the noise. Heard her affirmative answer and ordered, “Throw it.”

There was a hesitation that shouldn't be there in a situation like this. Don't question your orders, he thought.

Or maybe that should be, Don't follow the order to kill your comrade without questioning it, in which case Caroline was doing the exactly right thing.

“But, Sir, Anderson-”

“In ten seconds they'll be too close to _us_ ,” Justin snapped. “In fifteen seconds they'll shoot us. Do it, Corporal!”

He didn't look at her. Didn't see if she complied. But five seconds later the large, pale explosive flew past him and he took another three steps backwards before he dropped Naya and threw himself over her. The second explosion left his ears ringing. His communication unit died with a creak when the EMP fried the machines and all the soldiers' tech.

He didn't wait long afterward to see if it worked had. No longer preoccupied with firing, Bill came over and helped him carry Naya until they made it to their fall-back point along with the other survivors of their unit. Altogether, Justin counted nine. He was more than relieved when he saw that Andrew was among them, immediately rushing to Naya to tie off the gushing wound where her left arm used to be. Justin hadn't allowed himself to feel worry, but the level of relief was not diminished by that, and for a second it made him forget everything else.

The second was over all too soon. Naya screamed, her face white with shock and anger as she looked at the bloody thing that ended right above the elbow. Justin couldn't think about what this meant for her, all he cared about at the moment was that she lived. Other than Anderson. Whom he had sacrificed for her.

Her and Andrew and Mildred were the only ones left of his original team. They were special to him, even though he tried not to treat them any different. Now Naya was alive and Anderson was dead and as his heartbeat slowly calmed down and the immediate danger was over, Justin recognized his determination to go back for the Sergeant after getting the young woman out for what it had been: A lie he had told himself to make it easier to leave him behind.

Justin cursed, but he did it silently. Looked down at Andrew and Naya, and Bill now coming over to help stop the bleeding and keep the young woman from going into shock. Young woman. Justin still thought of her as a girl. Maybe that was why she was alive.

And maybe getting her arm blown off would turn out to be the thing that _kept_ her alive, since it would certainly keep her off the battlefields from now on...

He wouldn't think about it. Justin looked at, but didn't see, Naya as she let her head fall back and let the tears run down her face unashamedly. He was listening for the sound of oncoming machines. Nothing; the charge had taken them out. Listened for gunfire. It was there, but far away. The other teams, still fighting. Somehow, the machines had known they were coming, which meant their communication wasn't secure, or someone had given away their plans. Justin dismissed that possibility at once. People screwed each other over for petty gain, but the machines offered nothing in return.

They needed to get over there and help where their fellow soldiers were still under fire. But someone also had to get Naya to the makeshift camp at the edge of town where their medics were waiting to take care of the wounded. The thought stopped Justin cold for a second, as icy dread shot through him like a bullet. If the machines knew their plan of attack, they probably also knew the location of that camp, which they had left behind with little to no protection.

If it was lost, many would die. Naya might die. And Kate Connor was in it, a woman Justin respected and liked, nevermind the fact that she was their General's wife. Maybe they would now find out how Connor reacted when _he_ lost someone he cared about. It was something their leader seemed to have avoided so far by simply not having personal ties to an awful lot of people.

“Anybody's comm still working?” Justin asked his men. “Mildred?”

Mildred had been furthest from the EMP, but she, too, shook her head. Justin considered the facts that they had and made a decision. The situation had changed so Connor's orders no longer applied. With no means of communication with their commander, it was up to Justin to determine what to do next, and his decision was to take the entire team, not just two or three to support Naya, back to base. It would make them less vulnerable should they be attacked on the way than they would be if they split up, and should the base be attacked it would need their help more urgently than the other teams retreating in the distance.

Of whom they _knew_ they were being attacked. But the sound of shots was slowly dying, so fights were almost over, one way or another.

Their jeep, parked well away from the refinery, was miraculously undestroyed. Justin still had Caroline check for hidden explosives and then had everyone stay back while he climbed inside and started it up. Only after he had taken a few turns without it blowing up around him did he allow his men to get on it and drove to their destination as quickly as he could over streets that seemed to be filled with even more rubble than it have been when they came. Not an hour ago.

The drive wasn't long. Justin filled it with worry about the sky, about the condition of the streets and possible landmines, about more potential traps. He didn't think about Connor and the others whose status was unclear. His thoughts circled around their communications regarding this mission and if they had ever, in any way, mentioned where their base would be.

He was pretty sure they hadn't. _He_ hadn't, in any case – not as a precaution but because there simply had been no need. Did Connor or Hernandez or anyone else involved in the organization of this mission given the location to anyone on the radio? The bulk of them had already met on the way to Page and come to the base together. Maybe there was hope.

Because if the machines knew where their precious and barely protected medical was located, there was no way in Hell they didn't attack.

While he tried not to worry about the losses before he had to, Justin kept his eye out of smoke on the horizon, listened to the sound of fighting. Of slaughter, more like it. There was silence, and the darkening sky hid anything that may have risen before it. He stepped on the accelerator when the road was clear and just barely remembered not to take the jeep all the way to their hide out in case they were still being watched somehow.

It meant they had to carry Naya for a few hundred meters, all the while having their weapons ready. She tried to walk but pain and blood loss were leaving her weak. Still no sign of fiery destruction. It took them almost fifteen minutes to reach the nondescript building they had set up camp in, lacking any underground base in convenient distance to their point of attack. There was an old radio tower nearby, a big, ugly thing looming over everything with its crumbling satellite dish on top of a block of steel and concrete. They had chosen a long hall in the vicinity for cover. The building seemed untouched. No one was outside waiting for them.

They were waiting inside, though. No more than half a dozen medics Justin identified as such only because he knew their faces, and about ten armed civilians looking up nervously when Justin and the others came in. Only two people in uniforms, or what counted for uniforms these days. Immediately aiming for them and then kindly lowering the weapons unfired with an expression of relief on their faces. And Kate Connor, standing bent over a little portable table containing a radio, speaking into the headset as they stepped in.

“They're here,” Justin heard her say. “Came straight here apparently.” Realizing who she was talking about and to whom, he tapped his own comm unit and made a gesture as if to slice his throat with his palm. “Seems like their comms got fried. EMP?” she asked, and added, “Yeah,” when Justin nodded. “I'm counting nine.” Again Justin nodded his confirmation. “Good. We didn't see any. Good. See you then.” She ended the call and immediately came over to them.

“Anyone else hurt?” she asked as she moved past Justin to Naya and ordered Bill and Andrew to place her on one of the low, makeshift beds they had set up in preparation of casualties.

“Nothing serious,” Justin replied.

“Let us decide what's serious and what isn't. It'll be thirty minutes at least before the others arrive so right now we have time for things that aren't serious, and you better use it.” Because sometimes “not serious” just meant it would kill them much later. After infection set in. Justin got that, and he ordered everyone to let the medics and civilian helpers decent upon them. Dr. Brewster herself was taking care of Naya, along with a teenager by the name of Billy and an older woman Justin didn't know yet. The girl was in good hands but he still had to keep himself from going over there to watch.

But he had suffered minor burns on his hands and face, and while they were nothing in comparison to the burns that had laid him up for weeks a few years ago, he would lose any future discussion with his men about getting their injuries treated if he didn't let someone take care of them now.

The most pressing concern around the members of his unit was smoke inhalation. Inez had a splinter stuck above her elbow from the first explosion. The kind of thing that could kill later. Naya had lost her arm and Anderson, Carlson and Jackie were dead.

This was not a good day. And there was no way to go back to the beginning and do it all over again.

  


-

  


The first thing Connor did when he and the rest of the survivors arrived at the base was issue a warning to their temporary HQ in Yuma that their communication was compromised. They were to pass it on to all teams out there and to General Brewster's branch of the army in the north. No important information was to be relayed over the radio before they had figured out the problem and how to solve it. Someone suggested the possibility that there were physical bugs involved, transmitting everything said in their presence to Skynet, but Connor shook his head at the suggestion, pointing out that in that case the machines would know where this base was and it wouldn't exist anymore.

He was sitting on one of the five treatment tables, his shirt gone to reveal a bullet wound in his shoulder and the wiry but strong frame of a man who saw a lot of physical action and just enough food to have the energy for it. Somehow, eve half-naked and bleeding, he emitted calm authority, a refusal to accept this situation as the disaster it was. If he felt guilty of remorseful over the numerous soldiers that had been lost under his command this day, it wasn't reflected in either his expression or his voice.

He was all business already, while someone patched up his wound and people were dying and losing body parts all around him. It wasn't detachment Justin saw in his calm demeanor right now, but control. Focus. And bit by bit it made Justin calm down as well. Focus on what was to be done now, rather than what was already past and over with and couldn't be changed.

There was talk among those still upright about aborting the mission, cutting their losses and moving back to where they came from. Give up the refinery and the oil field it stood on. The machines had outsmarted them this time, they had walked straight into a trap and there was no Plan B. As long as they had not identified how the bots were spying on them, they couldn't come up with another attack plan anyway. So they ought to give up. Bury their dead (like Anderson and Carlson and Jackie, except there wasn't anything left to bury) and call it a day.

It didn't sit well with Justin. Giving up. Walking away defeated from a mission that had filled them with so much hope, with nothing to show for their losses. But Connor quietly listened to all the arguments presented to him and everyone else as to why they ought to let it go and return empty-handed rather than try again and not return at all.

It was only when he was slipping his bloodied shirts back over his freshly bandaged wound that he said, “No.”

“No, Sir?” Major Koslowski echoed.

“No. We will finish what we started. We need that fuel. There are too many things we have postponed for this mission and people have died for that.”

“Good soldiers have died here today,” Koslowski pointed out.

“Yes. And if we give up, they will have died for nothing.” Connor stood. While not a short man by any means, he wasn't extraordinarily tall either. Justin towered over him at close to 190 centimeters, yet Connor still looked at all of them as if he were standing on a pedestal. “We will figure this out, and then we will take that refinery,” he stated. For that was what it was: A statement. _This is how it's going to be._

And against better knowledge, Justin found himself believing that, indeed, that was how it was.


	11. 2016 - 3/3

Winter ended. Finally. Summer came, and people stopped dying so much. Alex's illness faded away completely and Kyle managed to sleep a little better at night. Of course, summer would bring more people on the transports and if the camp reached its maximum capacity again, the machines would start sorting again, as much as last year. Kyle dreaded that, but so far it hadn't happened. The winter had taken so many, it would be a while until their lines were filled again. And there weren't as many new ones at this point as there had been at the same time last year.

Maybe there just weren't as many people left out there. They had to run out at some point, right? Kyle wondered what would happen then. Nothing good, probably. When there was no more work to be done, the machines wouldn't need anyone to do it either.

He wondered if they would be forced to undress and jump into the pit themselves, or if the machines would kill them first.

If they were lucky, they wouldn't find out. He did his best not to think about it and focused on the good things instead. Summer. Not too many people to bury or to compete with. He was still alive, and so were Alex and Laina and that was all he allowed himself to care about.

There was a figure lying face-down in the dirt a few dozen meters away, half buried by it. It was small; a child barely big enough to escape the Box. Her coat had already been taken, and her shoes. The machines hadn't noticed yet and so no one had been ordered to remove her. Kyle focused on his work, unpleasant as it was. Of course this wasn't really summer, he thought. The older ones said that often enough. Summer meant warmth, real warmth. And sun. And flowers and beaches and birds singing in green trees and picking their fruit. Kyle knew that. He just didn't know what any of that meant.

That dead girl over there couldn't have known either.

Kyle had asked Alex once and Alex had described it to him, but Kyle quickly came to realize that his friend didn't know either, was merely repeating things he had been told by his parents when they were still alive. He hadn't seen it. Kyle wondered if any of the people around here had actually seen it, and sometimes he wondered if it was even true or if it was something they made up.

Around him the camp stretched bleak and muddy under the endless gray sky that already seemed to promise the snow that was never far away. Metal and stones, earth and clouds. Most of the year snow. He had never seen a tree but Alex claimed to have, once, though it didn't have leaves – whatever that was supposed to be in the end. It had been all bare and odd and Alex's mother had explained that it was dead. Kyle could barely remember a world without fences.

A dead-eyed woman walked over to Kyle with a wagon that was more like a box on wheels. A large box, and judging by the effort she had dragging it he assumed it was full. Kyle didn't swallow of grimace at the hated task that lay ahead of him. No one cared if he liked this.

The box was unloaded and the woman walked away. Kyle's job today was one people did on their own because the parts they dealt with were not heavy. Like sorting garbage. Like stripping the cover off old electronics.

It was new work, too. Came up only this year, or at least this was the first year Kyle had ever been assigned to it. He hated it more than anything else, event though it put him next to the oven, the only place in the camp that offered some warmth during the day.

He'd much rather be getting warm throwing bodies into the pit.

The warmth was at his back now, It wasn't strong and it didn't reach far; the fire that ate what was left of the people Kyle was handing here was far below, but some heat still made it up, the hot air climbing through the tube until it reached the end and quickly dissipated in the cold air, the icy wind blowing it away. There wasn't much wind today, but Kyle was still glad for the cap he was wearing pulled down over his ears, for his long hair protecting his neck. It had been hard earlier this year when his old cap had been stolen. Eventually a woman had tried to escape the camp, screaming hysterically like someone whose mind had snapped, and the machines shot her, and Kyle had been close enough to grab her cap before anyone else could get it.

The cap was slightly too big for him, not sitting firm enough. The wind got inside at bad angles and even threatened to blow it away when it was stronger, but Kyle still preferred the bit of warmth it offered to the warmth provided by this work station. Others were eager to work here just for that warmth and didn't care about anything else. He shouldn't either. Kyle tried to be more like those people, who would fight to get here if the machines let them. The first time he had been assigned this post he had been clueless, and thrilled by the heat rising up from the pipes. That was before he had opened the first box and seen what was inside.

In his life, Kyle had come face to face with dead bodies a lot, even before he ended up in this camp. They held no horror for him, probably never had. Unless he knew their names they were were simply part of the landscape or a task to be taken care of, and he was, at this point, quite good at pushing aside the idea that they had ever been anything else. The smell of decomposition still made him gag, but even that was just a part of life as it was. He preferred working somewhere else but that was all. And even the occasional disconnected body part that had come off didn't faze him anymore.

But what he had found inside the box that day was worse somehow. Kyle couldn't even give a reason why. It was just body parts. Arms and legs and one time half a torso. He didn't know why they were worse, what set them apart from everything else beside the number of them. A whole box full. And days later another one.

It must be the exclusiveness of them, he thought. Normally, there was a separated limb on the charts every now and again, or something mostly broken came off when they tried to lift the body up, but the body parts were always with the rest of the bodies, if not always with the right ones. And they had always come off before, in the Box or when the people were found in the streets already dead. This...

This, Kyle realized although he tried not to, seemed to be parts of bodies that had only just been taken apart. And he couldn't even tell if it had been before death or after. These were body parts for the sake of body parts, things that had been severed for a reason. By the machines. The machines never did anything like that.

To make things worse, most of the hands and feet and other parts were missing their skin. Kyle wished _all_ of them would miss it, because whenever there was anything left, it was his task to cut it off and put it into a small container while the rest went to the flames.

His mind recoiled from the task every time he had to do it but a machines was always nearby and even when it didn't seem to be watching, he knew not doing as he was told could easily end his life without warning. So he steeled his mind, forced himself to see this as just another action to be carried out, and did what he had to do.

Disconnecting his thoughts and actions from any emotional input, running out autopilot as Alex called it, was becoming easier. His nightmares thought differently about it, however.

Today's load was large again, but he hoped, because the box wasn't _entirely_ full, that it would be the only one for today. The stink blew into his face the moment he opened it and he had to turn his head away and try not to breathe. For a moment. A moment was all he could allow himself.

The body parts were glittering and sticky, but Kyle still took off his gloves so the stuff wouldn't seep into them. Easier to wash his hands. He took the first piece – a hand – turned it over to check for leftovers, and threw it into the pipe. Reached for the second. He made it to the fifth before he had to take the blade provided for it and strip a large patch of skin from a calf. He worked mechanically, keeping his focus on the execution of the action, not on the action itself. The skin went into the box, the leg went into the pipe. Next one. He wanted to get done with this, even though the heat from the fire below warmed his back where he was standing. The smell was almost unbearable. He wondered how Alex was faring with his work assignments today. Or Laina. They weren't here, so obviously pretty well.

Anything would have been better than this, he thought, and reached for the next part.

The work was done quickly when there was nothing to remove and stretched endlessly when there was. Still, it was nowhere near noon by the time Kyle had made so much progress that he had to reach deep into the stinking box to get the next bit. It was hard to see the bottom because the sun, which Kyle had never actually seen, didn't send a lot of light through the clouds even in summer and the box was deep, it's bottom dark from organic fluids standing inside. He would have to fish around in it for the final pieces, he knew, and already dreaded it. If Connor and his army ever had a plan to show up here, he thought with unusual dryness, now would be really, really good moment.

No one came. There were still some big pieces in there that were easy to see and grab and Kyle's fingers closed around the next one, cold and slimy and sticky and more than anything he ever dealt with _dead_. Pulled it out and started, then froze.

It was a hand, with half the forearm still attached to it. A right hand, not very big. Belonging to a small woman by the look of it, or to a child not much bigger than Kyle himself. Or so he thought. Tearing the skin off things changed their appearance a lot but by now Kyle had more experience with this than he would ever wish on anyone.

The bar code that had once been burned into the arm had been removed with the skin that bore it. Kyle wouldn't have been able to read or recognize it anyway. What he recognized was the missing ring finger. Along with the size of the hand and the bend pinky he had no doubt that this hand had once been attached to a boy called Marc.

His heart suddenly raced, and so did his thoughts. Automatically, Kyle looked around if anyone had seen what he was holding, inexplicably determined to keep this discovery secret from all the people here before he even became aware just _what_ he was discovering.

The thoughts connected quickly. Marc had disappeared months ago, led into one of the inaccessible buildings by machines that, by all rights, should just have killed him instead. No one knew what had become of him or the other people who had been taken there lately. And now a part of him was here, stripped of skin, cut from the rest. Maybe the rest of him was here, too – had gone unrecognized into the fire.

These body parts had once belonged to people in this camp. People they knew. People who had been whole when the machines got them. Kyle felt sick. Suddenly the stink from the box seemed to suffocate him and the heat from the pipe became oppressive. If he threw up, the bot over there might shoot him. Or worse. He didn't throw up.

He also didn't really see anything when he moved the severed limp over to the pipe and threw it into the fire. Memories drifted through his mind, of talk he had heard. Speculations about what the machines were doing with the people they took away. Experiments and such. Turning them into machines themselves was a popular theory. _Taking their skin and wearing it was a disguise_. Kyle had seen how uncomfortable everyone was at the idea even as it was joked away. He imagined how people would react when they learned it might be true, here, where no one could run...

No. There was nothing they could do about it so no one could know. No one... Not even Alex? Kyle nervously thought of his friend, wondering if he could tell him. Should tell him. He needed to share this and Alex was the only one he trusted not to turn this into a panic that would get everyone here killed – or shoved into those buildings to have their bodies taken apart in the name of – what?

So far there were no humans-turned-robots running around, nor any machines with human faces. Were there? Would they even notice? Kyle shuddered as he, still moving on auto pilot, reached for the next part, which appeared to have once been someone's thigh, probably. Maybe the bots were among them already. In which case he _should_ warn everyone. Except, what would be the point? It was not like they could do anything about it. And suddenly Kyle had a vision of the people in this camp, already dictated by mistrust and fear, accusing one another of being robots. Taking each other apart to see if it was true, or just as an excuse...

No. This knowledge would be good for no one.

Maybe he was selfish to share it with Alex. No, not maybe. It would be selfish. Alex wouldn't profit from it, would only feel as bad as Kyle did right now. Would just be a little more afraid than he was before. Kyle wouldn't tell him. There was no practical excuse for it, as much as he wished there was. Warn Alex – but to what point? No. The downsides outweighed the upsides and he wouldn't do it. Because if he had a way to unlearn this discovery, he would do it. As it was, he did his utmost to push the thoughts aside and just keep working.

  


-

  


Despite his decision to keep his secrets, Kyle sought out Alex that night, feeling the need for the company of someone he trusted and felt comfortable with. He saw him at the food distribution and they signaled each other to meet before they climbed into their respective beds to wait if the machines would check for absences that night. They did not, and as soon as Kyle felt it was safe he disappeared, taking his blanket with him. He was in a hurry, fear making him almost careless, because Scar Face, who had not been killed for the minor injuries he'd suffered the year before, had been eying him all afternoon and if there was one thing Kyle could not deal with tonight it was _that_.

He squeezed through a tunnel almost too narrow for even him to fit, his already less-than-clean blanket getting sullied further as he dragged it behind him. Waited with held breath as the sounds of footsteps above him moved to the loose crate that covered the entrance to this tunnel, heard it be removed. For long time there was silence, then the panel was replaced and the footsteps faded into the distance. Kyle was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when he heard an exchange of word in deep male voices.

He didn't make out the words nor did he recognize the other voice, but chances were it didn't bode well for anyone nearby to have two of them sneak around up there. It was better to be cautious and hide than risk being discovered by anyone not explicitly proven to be friendly. And there were not a lot of those. Even if there were, they wouldn't have the chance to prove themselves friendly because all the young ones were always hiding. Kyle was aware of that dilemma but wasn't stupid enough to take the risk. Anyone who talked to Scar Face had to be bad anyway. (Besides, one man had tried to protect him once, a year ago or so, and had gotten his teeth punched out for his trouble. Not worth it.)

The place Kyle was hiding in was not a dead end as such, but it lead to one. In order to find Alex he had to crawl out and get to another part of the tunnels and pipes that ran underneath half the camp. But it was a long time before he felt safe enough to go leave this place, and when he finally got to the area where he expected his friend to wait for him, he couldn't find him.

Kyle kept looking for a long time but eventually admitted defeat, assuming that Alex had either been held up as he had, or given up waiting for him in this too-accessible area while Kyle was hiding from those men, or had decided to spend the night with Laina instead. It wasn't rare that they didn't find each other in here, as regular meeting places were dangerous, and often they didn't even try. Kyle was used to being alone at night. This night, he would rather not have been, and sleep, once he found a good place for it, was a long time coming.

He did not find Alex until after sunrise, when they were all gathered to get their bit of food. Even then he did not find him immediately but only when almost all workers had gotten their share. A loud, yelling voice attracted everyone's attention and people stove apart on instinct, aiming to be as far from the source of obvious trouble as possible. Kyle was dragged away with the flood of bodies that reminded him of the people from the transport the day he had gotten here. (Now, with almost all memories of before fading and hazy, it seemed like the first day of his life.) He managed to find the illusion of shelter between a bed frame and the bodies of several grown ups who did not pay him any mind when everyone finally stopped to turn around and see what was going on.

A man was standing in the middle of the open space. He had bearded like almost all men and the beard was colored red now with blood running from his nose, but tall and broad shouldered, with a scar down the side of his face, so Kyle recognized him anyway. His right arm was gesticulating wildly, the left hand was firmly wrapped around Alex's arm, dragging him behind him. Alex looked dazed. There was blood running from his nose as well and Kyle's own blood seemed to freeze in his veins.

He'd always thought that Alex was a tall guy, especially considering that he was still growing. Beside this man he looked small and ridiculously thin and already broken.

There wasn't even time to react. When Kyle saw them, Scar Face was in the progress of yelling out words directed at, he realized with shock, himself, and Laina, and all kids out here in this camp. “This is what happens when you think you can fight us,” he declared. “Let it be a warning.”

For one second, over all the noise and the fear, Alex's eyes met Kyle's. And then, with one powerful movement, Scar Face reached over with his other hand and twisted Alex's arm until it snapped.

There was a scream of pain, brief and aborted. A scream of shock and rage from Kyle as he tried to break through the people standing in front of him, only to find himself grabbed from behind by a vice-like hold that wouldn't let him go no matter how hard he struggled. A hand on his shoulder and the old man it belonged to standing before him, blocking his way. Blocking his _view_. Kyle wanted Alex to run, to hide in the tunnels somewhere where the bots wouldn't find him until his arm was healed and he had a right to live again, but wounds like that never healed, not here, and he already knew that Alex wouldn't even try.

He heard the whirr of a machine and waited for the sound of gunfire. It didn't come, yet when the old man finally stepped out of his way, Alex was gone and Scar Face was looking at all of them with triumph written all over his face.

It was the first time Kyle ever wished death on someone. More than that, he wanted his friend back. With no corpse and no evidence that Alex had been killed, the sense of loss was still overwhelming. If Alex wasn't dead yet he would be taken to the barracks to be skinned and cut to pieces. The thought gave Kyle the strength to fight against the arms holding him once more, but they still wouldn't let go.

He wished there had been a gunshot. But this place didn't even give him that little comfort.

Gradually, things calmed down. Kyle's struggle ceased as he accepted that there was nothing he could do anymore and he was just wasting his energy. One way or another, Alex was gone and out of reach forever, not any more alive to him that his mother or Alyssa, whose body he had never seen either. Who had, for all he knew, died in the Box. Maybe they would simply kill Alex soundlessly as well, by pushing him into the pit or into the oven below. Kyle's eyes filled with tears when he realized that he was hoping for that. Just so he could imagine his friend wasn't right now being pushed towards the barracks.

(He didn't even know what was waiting for him. If he did, maybe he would fight and get himself shot. Maybe Kyle should just tell everyone so they could fight and get themselves shot when the time came but that was not how the bots dealt with problems if they wanted the outcome to be something else. They had, and would always have, all the power here.)

At some point he had lost his balance and fallen to the ground, the person holding him landing on top of him. He hadn't even noticed. Now that he was calmer, the hold around his middle loosened and he was able to move. Apparently, all he had to do in order to get away was stop fighting. The thought left him with the absurd urge to laugh but he didn't. Instead he twisted around, took in his surroundings and the person on top of his legs, still pinning him down. Blinking away he tears he looked into the tear-stained face of Laina, who must have wanted to save Alex too, and who hated Kyle, and who had probably (as he was distantly acknowledging) just kept him from getting himself killed. He registered it with dull, distant surprise.

Seconds later she was off him and then he was upright, too, though he couldn't tell nor did he care whether he had gotten up on his own or she had pulled him up, or if it had been someone else. It was Laina in his face, in any case, hissing, “Get to work. Go on!” and shoving him non-too-gently towards the exit of the rest area.

So Kyle went. And he got to work, and he went through the motions as if nothing had happened. Just like everyone else. To work for the machines was, after all, the only right they had to their existence. And in the grand scheme of things, nothing _had_ happened, except that all the kids in the camp where reminded once more that it was better not to fight. Just like no one ever fought here, unless they wanted to die. No one ever fought to win.

Death was the only thing to look forward here and even that had, to Kyle, lost its comfort. His mind kept circling around the barracks, and the silence, and around last night, wondering if Alex would still be alive if Kyle had not been in hiding for so long. Or if he hadn't hidden at all and Scar Face would have found _him_ instead. He wouldn't have fought, knowing it would have been pointless. Alex had been taller, stronger – he must have thought he had a chance now.

A lot of kids didn't make it through the transition from child to adult, for the very same reason. It was even worse for the girls, who got killed if someone got them pregnant. Kyle was still too small and weak to even try, and for the first time the thought of getting to the point where he might filled him with desperation rather than hope and determination. Because he knew now that he wouldn't just die quickly if he failed. And he wondered if he would have the courage, ever, to even fight at all now.

But if he wasn't going to, he might as well take the filleting knife at the burn-station and slit his own throat. In the following days he thought about it sometimes. It wasn't a new thought, but even now he was no closer to acting on it than he had ever been. He wasn't going to give up. Not while there was the slightest hope that one day, he might get the chance to fight back.

  


-

  


The return to Yuma was triumphant. They had lost a third of their men, had been delayed by weeks and half of those returning were injured – some so bad they would no longer be able to fight the machines, at least not on the battlefield. And they were returning to Yuma when they ought to have been in San Diego by now, the move of the head quarters aborted when they found out their communications weren't safe. And yet it was a triumph. The people left behind were clapping when they came in. In the evening, after everyone had settled down and they had a chance to take stock, there would be a feast.

It wouldn't be much. Just a little more food than normally, a luxury they could only indulge in because the base here was so small and so many were still in Tucson. It was all there in the presentation. There would be music, and right now the big hall was being prepared, and everyone would revel in the moment while it lasted.

It didn't take much, for people who had almost nothing. All they needed was a little sign that this was special.

And it was. They had taken the oil field. It was a major victory that would make things so much easier from now on. One that was (or so they hoped) worth the price they had paid for it.

Kate suspected – no, she _knew_ – that this, right here, was the reason why John had decided to go through with their attack even after they had walked into the machines' trap. They had to give these people _something_. If they had lost so much – so many friends, so many loved ones – with nothing to show for it, the blow to the morale of everyone, in the army and outside it, would have been devastating.

It had worked out in the end. They had won. A small victory, but an important one. And they had found out how Skynet had been listening in on them and had solved that problem. But they still needed to find a way to prevent something like that in the future. And they were fairly sure that the machines now knew where their base in San Diego was. In which case they would either booby-trap it while none of the few already there were looking, or – more likely – mow it down once everyone had moved in. The base was not so far down beneath the ground that it would survive an air strike.

In other words, they couldn't go there anymore. On top of everything else – getting the others out of there, finding a new place, setting it up, and the eternal worry that Skynet was listening after all – Kate was disappointed. She had seen pictures of the place. It was spacious, had many small and medium sized roomed in its wings. Great for setting up her clinic, great for some privacy for more than just her, John, and their children.

The people needed that, needed something better than blankets and sheets to live their lives behind. Not just because privacy was important but also because John Connor and his family had it, and as much as everyone admired him, eventually people were going to stop being so gracious about the extra benefits of their status. It had already started.

Not that everyone would have gotten a private room in San Diego. Not by far, But it would have been a hell of a lot more people than now, a hell of a lot of people not connected to the brass of the army, and it would sooth the feelings of envy and the accusation of favoritism. At least for a while.

It wouldn't have made things better forever. Humans were not meant to live like this, especially those who remembered a life before the bunkers. But it would have helped. While their support was still strong and the voiced causing unrest were few and far in between, people who were unhappy would be all too willing to listen to these voices, taking them one step closer to a situation Kate had been fearing for more than a decade.

And who was happy in this world, anyway?

Kate was prepared to do her part in the organization of the party, since Hank wasn't in Yuma and therefore couldn't take care of it. She found herself a third wheel soon enough, however, while other people took care of everything. They were more in touch with the layout of this bunker, had an overview of the supply situation that she was lacking after weeks of absence and never really having moved in here. They didn't want her help, insisting instead that she go and rest after her long trip and all the work she did saving people's lives. So Kate walked off, feeling vaguely ashamed because she had forgotten there were other people outside her small circle of associates who were competent and helpful. At the same time she felt proud and a little more optimistic because people would manage no matter what, and also a little bit left out.

She had gone to see her girls right after coming back; Jeanette and Louisa had been left in the care of Li, who hadn't made it trip north due to her advanced pregnancy and the fact that someone with experience had to stay behind. She didn't mind taking care of the two another day while their mother settled back into her place here, but Kate thought about going back to them now, take them to their room and have a rest until the evening. She was tired, and it was promising to be a long night. And tomorrow, all the work would continue. There was, as always, much to be done.

But first, before she would do anything else, she went to medical. It was just a small room here for examinations, and an equally small one adjoining, holding all of three beds for patients. It had been empty when Kate had left, and if everyone was lucky, it would still be. All the wounded soldiers were elsewhere, most with friends of family or in the care of their units that were already preparing to move on in a couple of days. No one had been in critical condition when they had made it back here. Those who had been hadn't survived the way home.

It had been worth it, she reminded herself. For the morality-boost if nothing else. She had spend a lot of time of her life justifying losses like that.

There was light in medical. It was the first things she saw when she neared the place and it didn't surprise her; in fact, it would have angered there if it had been dark. Someone always had to be there in case they were needed, even if it was just an untrained civilian helper whose only job it was to run and wake whoever was available at the moment. If Kate went in there and found one of those, she thought, then she would know that no one needing constant care was laid up in the back room right now and could go home to rest.

But it was Melissa Kate found in the examination room. All alone. Leaning against the table, and Kate was overcome by an odd sense of deja-vu when the image seemed to overlap, for a moment, with the day they had lost that young soldier in Tucson and Melissa had stood there just like that, looking at Kate as she came inside. Event the expression on her face was the same, as if she had taken half a step out of reality and was occupying a spot somewhere in the past.

She shouldn't have been here, should have been resting the way Kate indented to. Suddenly nervous, Kate bit her lip, eying the scalpel her old friend was holding in her hand. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “It's been a long trip. You must be tired.”

Melissa smiled that distant smile. “They were happy when I came and told them to go home. They were happy.”

“They appreciate a break like everyone else,” Kate said carefully. “It must have been hard with so many of us gone.”

“They said someone would come and take over soon. I'm waiting for them. We shouldn't leave this place unattended.” It almost sounded like a question at the end. Kate couldn't take her eyes off the scalpel, the way the thin fingers kept running over it. She imagined a writer running their fingers over their pen that way while they contemplated where to take the story next, or just looking for the perfect words to take the story where it had always been going. Melissa's eyes left Kate's face and the smile left hers, and she looked thoughtful and empty.

“It was good of you to help. But I'm here now,” Kate pointed out. “I can take over. Why don't you go and get some rest?”

“I've been thinking,” Melissa said. “I have been thinking a lot since I came back. From the camp, I mean. I didn't think that much when I was there. You just exist there, you know?” She shook her head. “No, that's not true. But what I thought there didn't matter. It's not really a part of the world. I didn't feel like it was in the end, but when I came here nothing seemed real anymore. Nothing touches me. Nothing _matters_.”

“You're just tired.” Kate knew it wasn't true, that his wasn't something new, or temporary. “Give me that,” - she indicated the scalpel - “and get some sleep. Things will be busy tomorrow and I'll need your help.”

“At some point there, among all the dead and dying, I stopped caring,” Melissa mused, as if she hadn't heard. “I have seen and done things that I never thought I could bear but I did. And now I am out it doesn't make a difference. I think, maybe if we had been freed while I still had hope, it would have been different. I don't know. I'd like to think that.” She smiled again, but it was vague and distant, not even like that dead smile she had before. “I came back and I was just going through the motions. I thought if I acted like the person I once was, she would come back. But it didn't happen.”

“Melissa...”

“I think I used to be a good person. And now I'm not.”

“Melissa, give me that blade,” Kate demanded. But the other woman didn't seem to hear her.

“I remember...” She tilt her head, as people did when they were thinking. “I remember, long ago, just after the war, we had a conversation, you and I. I thought about that a lot since then. A lot.”

_We had many conversations_ , Kate thought desperately.  _And all of them meant something._

“You were unhappy about someone who had died, someone we had to kill to not waste the medication we would have needed to save him. Do you remember that? You didn't like it.”

“I remember,” Kate said. She did. In her memories of the distant past this moment stood out with stark clarity.

She shivered.

“I told you that you should save a bullet for the day that you did,” Melissa told her what she had never forgotten.

“I still don't like it,” Kate said. “I do it because I have to, but I don't like it. And neither do you.”

“I don't like it,” Melissa confirmed. “I almost wish I did. I don't hate it either. I should have told you to save a bullet for the day you stop caring. May it never come.” Her smile was more genuine now, almost open. There was something like affection in it when she looked at Kate, or at least an echo thereof. “Bullets are precious, like medicine,” she mused. “We shouldn't waste them.” Before Kate could stop her she dragged the blade of the scalpel across her throat.

A fterward, Kate held her, crying and trying in vain to still the bleeding without blocking the open airway. Calling for help; at least she thought she did. It was what one did in a situation like this. She didn't remember. Maybe she hadn't. In the end, Melissa died very quickly.

Li appeared just that little bit too late, Billy in tow. (Kate didn't know why they would come if she hadn't called.) They looked upset. Neither of them looked surprised. Even that moment, sitting on the flood of her examination room with her friend's body growing cold in her arms, Kate  wondered how she could have been the only one who hadn't seen this coming.

E xcept maybe she had. Maybe she hadn't called for help either.

Li send her away and Kate just left, didn't even stay to deal with the body. She needed to wash all that blood off. Kate hadn't been wearing her medical shrubs, had got all that blood over her traveling clothes, and she didn't have an awful lot of those. They would keep, even with blood stains, she thought as she wandered back to her family's room. As long as they didn't have any holes in them. She'd try to get it out as best she could anyway. Even though they were dark. No one would even see if they didn't know.

She reached the room and closed the door. Stood in front of it for a long time, not moving. Now that she had the chance to shed all her clothes, she couldn't work up the energy. The room was empty. There was the mattress that was just big enough for two adults a nd two children for the rare occasion that they all slept here at once, which so  far  had not happened. Now rolled up  in the corner, though not as neatly as Kate had left it weeks ago.  T he girls were sleeping with Li while Kate and John were gone,  but  they had been in here to play, no doubt. Kate suddenly wondered if they should have given the room to someone else while they weren't here. Li hadn't wanted it, but others would have. It was a silly thought because they had  thought  it before and found it wanting due to the sensitive papers locked in the steel cabinet in the corner and all the other things not meant for everyone's eyes. But Kate wondered anyway, now. It wouldn't have been hard to move that stuff to the care of someone else for the duration, except that everyone in the army John trusted that much  had been with them in  Page .

F inally her fingers found the buttons and zippers and her shirt landed on the floor with a wet and heavy sound. Kate turned and looked at it for a moment, thoughts of how the blood was now soiling the floor, too, how she didn't want an y bloodstains where they had made their home, however temporary, running through her head but not connecting to any kind of motivation for action. Eventually she just stepped away, stripped off her undershirt as well because it was light gray and showed red spots all over where the blood had seeped through. He r pants needed to go. She filled the basin with water that was old and cold and stale and just enough to get the job done and set to work.

It felt like all she accomplished was spread the blood more evenly over her body.

It was a long time before she was comfortable enough to give up. A visit to the baths would be in order, and much as she didn't want to run into other people, she wanted to be covered in the leftovers of Melissa's blood even less. Once the decision had been made, Kate got restless, could hardly get there soon enough. Owing to the limited water, people were only allowed to wash at assigned times and at this time of day no one would be there anyway. Kate, as member of the medical staff, was allowed whenever she wanted.  But she couldn't go naked, and before she was done pulling the first unsoiled shirt that she could find over her head, she heard voice s outside the door. Happy, excited voices. She had a second to put herself together before her  daughters came in. Just enough time to notice the blood-soaked shirt still lying at the entrance of the room, not enough to remove it.

T he girls stopped short when their eyes fell on the mess Kate had allowed to spread all over the ir floor. Their eyes were wide and startled, but neither Jeannie nor her much younger sister showed any kind of repulsion or fear at the sight of so much blood. Kate hated this world, she hated it with a passion.

“Don't touch that,” she said when Lou crouched down and reached for the shirt. “I'll clean it up in a moment.”

Jeannie looked at her through those large blue eyes, the color of Kate's own. She had Kate's red hair, too, but her face was that of her grandmother, Lily Louisa, Kate's mother that her other daughter was named for. The expression on her face was Mom's, too, as she asked, “What happened, Mommy?”

“It's not mine. Leave it. I come straight from the clinic.” The shirt's sleeves were too long, fell right over her hands. Covering all the blood, but Kate could still feel it, itching all over.

“You never bring your bloody stuff here,” Jeanette said, with merciless awareness. She came over and took Kate's hand, looking up with eyes full of worry. “Are you okay?”

N o, Kate thought. She wasn't okay. She wasn't okay and her seven-years-old daughter was trying to comfort her. Nothing was okay. This world was terrible.  She wanted John to come here and remind her that it wouldn't always be this way.

“No,” she said. “A friend of mine died today, and I'm very sad.”

“Who?” Lou asked, coming over as Kate knelt down to pull Jeannie closer in appreciation for her concern and because she needed to hold on to something. Lou's voice was high pitched still, all little girlby sound, but the idea of death didn't faze her.

“Melissa. You remember her? She was my friend from when I was a girl myself.”

Both children nodded. They had met Melissa when they were being watched by the medical staff, though not often. None the less, Lou's eyes filled with tears.

“Did the machines kill her?” Jeannie asked. It must have been a logical conclusion to her. Most people were.

Kate pulled them closer, both of them. “Yes,” she said, and it wasn't a lie. For a long moment she buried her face in Jeanette's oversized sweater, handed down for years from one kid to the next. Lou awkwardly reached up to stroke her hair the way her mother did for her when she was upset and it was all Kate could do not to start sobbing.

The moment didn't last long. Her eyes were still dry when she stood, then picked up her soiled clothes and a dry towel and excused herself to her daughters, promising she would be back soon. Then she threw the clothes down again, into a corner, and just left.

The bathroom was as deserted as she had hoped, the single brass basin devoid of water. They had installed a pipe from the large container that filled half the room, though, so Kate didn't have to carry buckets. She didn't think she would have had the nerve for it today.

A gas stove at the back of the room completed the interior. On it, bowls of water were boiled on wash days to keep the bath water from being icy, and while Kate didn't have the energy to bother she did it anyway, because otherwise the water would simply have been too cold to bear and she would have risked illness.  She didn't, however, bother to really heat up the water  in the tub, just  added  barely enough  hot water to make it cold rather than icy. All the time she was naked, having dropped her clothes the moment she entered the bath. No one would come in, and if they did, she would mind only because she wanted to be alone, not due to a sense of modesty that life in cramped bunkers had long since taken out back and shot.

K ate knelt before the tub, washing her arms and torso until there was nothing of that pinkness left but the one that came from scrubbing and cold. Then she washed her face. Then she climbed into the half-filled tub, drew her kneed to her chest and her face to her knees and wept.

Only when the cold became unbearable and drove whatever warmth was left in her from her bones did she get out.  She dried herself thoroughly, feeling drained, but calmer now. Tired. She wanted to curl up on her bed and sleep for a day, or a week. Or forever. The thought of ever getting up again was almost too much to handle, and then she thought of all the things that needed taking care of, and of the celebration this evening that she needed to be seen at, and cried again.

She hadn't cried this much, she thought, since the day she accepted that her mother and Charlie weren't coming back. So many dead had gone unmourned.

Only when she put on her shirt again did she realize that it wasn't her shirt at all. When John had had the time to go to their room and leave his stuff strew around was beyond her, but huddling deeper into the well-worn material she was glad that he had. She wanted him now. Wanted him to comfort her because she was suffering in ways she rarely allowed herself to, and his calm certainty always made everything a little better. Most of all she wanted to talk, about what happened and why and the things she couldn't tell her children.

The kids were gone when Kate got back to her room, as was the pile of messy clothes. On the bed was a handwritten note by Li explaining that she had taken them back until the evening should Kate be looking for them. Kate didn't look. She curled up on the bed, pulled the cover over her head and closed her eyes.

Sleep didn't come. She drifted a little, and the world continued to spin, and after too short a time the door opened and John came in.

“You're awake,” he said instead of a greeting when she sat up and blinked at him. “Good.” He seemed distracted and in a hurry, eager to go over some things with her. Important things. More important than a dead woman on the floor of Kate's examination room. Such a tiny detail in the great picture, one that he certainly didn't even know about. Kate opened her mouth to say something, but he was already spreading out maps and papers on their mattress and gestured for her to come look at them.

S o she did.

The fact that for a while the machines had been listening in to their radio transmissions was a problem that continued to keep them busy. They didn't know how much the enemy had learned through this so they would act on the principle of “better safe than sorry”. Unfortunately, this meant that various bases around the country now had to be given up, and the sooner they got everyone out of there, the better. They couldn't make the move on to San Diego, had to find an alternate location. Kate suggested Blythe as there was a base there that was big, mostly empty, and had gone undiscovered for eighteen years, but John wanted something further into California. “ Blythe is too far from L.A.,” he explained. “The large camp there has to be our next objective,  after Vegas .”

I t made sense. That camp was the largest of the ones still left. A lot of them had either been liberated or closed, and for a year now no new ones had been opened anywhere. John feared that the machines were either running out of people to enslave, of work to do, or they were reacting to the successful attacks that had cost them their camps and raised the numbers of the enemy forces. He feared that eventually they would put a stop to this phase of their elimination of humanity and close all the camps that still existed, least they fell to Connor and his arm y . So it made sense to go for the biggest camp first, save as many people as was possible.

Math. That was it came down to, once again.

By their estimation they still had years until the machines decided that the camps were more trouble than they were worth, but they would need at least half a year to prepare in any case. And now they would lose a lot of time searching for a base that they didn't have to fucking build first. And that was only one of their several problems.

“I want your father to take control of the oil field,” John explained, making Kate look at him in surprise. Her father was taking care of the North-East, leading a branch of the army that took it's general instructions from John and followed his call if he gave one but operated mostly independently. They could do that because John trusted Robert Brewster to know what he was doing and to always act in the best interest of mankind. The two of them often conferred on the radio, exchanging opinions and comparing intelligence. They usually tried to find the best course of action together; only very rarely had John flat-out ordered General Brewster what to do.

Kate wondered if this would be one of those times. She had barely ever spoken to her father directly in the past five years or so, had seen him even more rarely, but she couldn't imagine him to voluntarily give up what he was doing right now and stay put in one place, guarding fuel. Even though that fuel was the most important resource they had and losing it would throw them back years and maybe even make this war hopeless. Kate knew that, and her father would know it as well. Still...

“He wasn't involved in the attack that took it,” she pointed out. “Myers may have something to say about that.”

For reasons that were entirely irrational and probably entirely human, the separate divisions of the army felt territorial over the bastions they conquered. Colonel Myers had been entrusted with the protection and maintenance of the refinery, and while all had been aware that it would only be a temporary station and the Colonel had, in fact, been eager to move on, he would not like having to relinquish his command to “The Big Man of the North”, as soldiers had taken to calling General Brewster. Kate didn't know Myers very well, but she had gotten the impression that he would mind having his prize taken from him by someone who didn't have to do anything to get it.

“Myers will have to deal with it. I need him elsewhere, which should distract him anyway. Part of his division has to stay behind, though, to help Bob and his men to settle in.”

That wasn't going to make things any easier on the interpersonal level. “Dad won't like it either,” Kate said carefully.

John looked at her, with that intense gaze he sometimes had that reminded her there was so much going on in his head that even she wasn't privy to. “I know,” he simply said. “But there's no one else I trust with this. At the moment that refinery is exceedingly vulnerable. Things will change after we established a base around it and put up more defenses. He has good, capable men under his command, and when the time comes he may pass the station on to one of them. But right now I need _him_ there.”

And Dad would accept this shift in his responsibility, no doubt. It would be no different than leading from a base like this bunker, except with less outside action. A part of Kate was almost glad her father wouldn't be allowed on the numerous battlefields of the north for a while, considering he was no longer young and the hard life and an accumulation of minor injuries were taking its toll on his body.

There might even be a chance she'd see him again one day. He still wouldn't like it, and neither would anyone else, and yet John had made his decision and it wouldn't be changed.

He was charismatic. His people loved him and trusted him. He would be able to sell it and there would be no problem. Not at once, anyway.

Kate rubbed her hand over her eyes, feeling so very tired. “What else?” she asked, feeling that this hadn't be all yet.

“We need to move out of here.”

She looked at him. “Now?”

“The sooner the better. We don't know if this base is still safe. It was never meant to house us for long anyway.”

“Yeah, but in case you forgot: we don't have anywhere to go, since you don't want to go to Blythe.”

“We may have to for the moment. We can't stay here and the others can't stay in Tucson. Blythe isn't ready yet but it's better than nothing. I'm sending out teams to secure the road from Tuscon, and then we'll get out of here.”

That was a vague time table but it all sounded very urgent, like they wouldn't have a lot of time. Kate mentally checked the list of everything they had to do to prepare and ran into a wall of fatigue and lack of information of this place's status. “We're leaving when the road is secure? That would be a week at least.” Not a lot of time. And yet... “Are we gonna be safe until then?”

“I'm not taking that risk. We will leave the day after tomorrow.”

“Two days!” Kate stared at him. “And where do you plan on taking us all? Are you mad?”

John's face was unreadable. “I would rather have more time, but if the machines know where we are, I don't think we can risk staying any longer than absolutely necessary. I would leave tomorrow if we could pull it off.”

Kate shuddered. It was bad, then. Really bad, if leaving unprepared, which could kill them all, was better than staying another night.

She was suddenly overcome by visions of the machines breaking in here, setting everything on fire, and knew that the last two nights in this place would offer no peace for her. “We can't tell everyone.”

“No. There would be a panic. But we have to get them ready, and here's where I need your help. Get all the people to pack up and be ready in two days. I'll take care of the fire power. Myles and his team already started preparing while we were on the way back but with so few people left here they didn't get far.”

“We have no time for a celebration,” Kate realized. She wasn't sad about that because she had no energy to deal with one, but she had even less energy for their hasty retreat. That one was necessary, though, so she would be able to do it, energy or not.

“No, but we need one. Everyone's going to get this night, and tomorrow we will deal with reality.”

He was right. People needed this. And John understood his people in ways that Kate had learned to rely on even though she wasn't always able to have that understanding herself. No, she thought, that wasn't true. It was just that sometimes she let her own feelings get in the way of knowing better.

John never seemed to let his own feelings get in the way of anything and sometimes she resented him for it. It was what they needed, though. It was what would get them through this war, if anything would.

“Those in charge of packing are already informed,” John concluded. “They will start during the festivities tonight.”

And tomorrow, Kate would tell everyone that the weather or availability of transport or any other factor other than impending doom was forcing them to hurry the hell up with their exit from this place. Tonight she would start getting ready, after being seen at the party that was starting just about now. It was important to be a part of the people, even if tonight she didn't feel like she was.

Their conversation having reached its end, both Kate and John changed into shirts that were somewhat clean and also the correct size, and then John offered her his arm as if they were teenagers on their way to the prom they'd never had. Kate felt like she was on the way to her execution.

John seemed to notice. At times he did actually notice what was right in front of him. “Are you okay?” he asked, and if he had asked that when he had come into the room half an hour ago, Kate would have said No, and would have cried in his arms for another thirty minutes.

“Just tired,” she said. “It's been a long month.”


	12. 2018 - 1/3

Ice crunched under his feet as John stepped onto the river, the rubber soles of his shoes easily finding grip on the rough surface mix of loose splinters and old snow. The Colorado ran through the land like a road, flat and steady. To the west, barely visible in the first light of dawn, was a town. It was small, unimportant, and from the distance it looked intact. As if any moment the first lights would turn on in the windows as people got out of bed and prepared for work. They wouldn't. John had been there, had seen the subtle signs of invasion everywhere. The town was empty. All it would house now was them, for a single night.

Seven men and women walked by John's side. They had been out on a supply mission, one day down south, to a community of scavengers on the other side of the river. The ice was too rough here, with gabs at the edges where it no longer quite lined up with the shore, and the only bridge still intact after the bombings had collapsed in an earthquake a few months ago, Taking a car was out of the question for more reasons than that, however. They had to cross a stretch of land where the machines were active, if rare, and they were much less likely to be spotted on foot.

And the supplies they had left to get weren't plenty and didn't need to be carried. In fact, they could walk by themselves. Four of them were new recruits for the army who had decided to join them after a long time of hesitation. Others had visited that settlement twice before and a few of the scavengers had come with them the first time, none the second. Now, with John Connor himself showing up to plead their case and remind everyone that the only way for anyone to ever be safe again was to fight, more got over their fear. Two of the ones with them right now were still in their teens, but now their decision had been made, they walked steadily with grim determination. John hoped he wasn't leading them to their death, but then, he hoped that about everyone and often in vain.

A few more had promised to follow after their families or significant others had returned from their tour of the nearest city, so they could inform them of their leaving and maybe talk them into coming along. Perhaps those people would show up, perhaps they wouldn't. They might lose heart after needing so long to find it, or might be talked out of it. John would not calculate them into his plans. And getting new recruits hadn't actually been the point of this endeavor anyway. They were simply a welcome bonus.

No, the reason why they had taken on the hardship of walking over ice and through dead forests for a day in each direction was trailing behind them, quiet and steady and watchful without being afraid.

Evie and Hernandez were pulling a wagon that contained other things they had gotten while they were at it; things the traders that occasionally passed near their base couldn't provide. Everyone had a back pack, with the new ones carrying with them all they owned. It wasn't enough to fill the bags.

John carried the food. They had enough at the base – what he carried on his back was just what they needed for the trip. It was the water that weighed most. He could feel the heavy pull on his shoulders, and yet they needed to hurry in order to make it before they ran out. Melting snow required a fire they didn't dare make in this area.

It was cold, as it always was. The snow was high everywhere, except on the ice where a steady wind had blown off everything but a thin sheet that wasn't enough to cover and hide irregularities that could make them fall. Today there was no wind, for the first time in weeks. No snow was falling, either, but the air was icy, their breath freezing in front of their faces, and the sound of every step seemed to cut the silence like a knife. They were the only sources of noise in a world that was silent as a grave and seemed, but for them, devoid of all life.

There was no sense of urgency in their steps although they did not linger. No wariness in the way they looked around. They were almost relaxed, as if the stillness of this place was seeping into their bones. It was peaceful, John eventually put a name to the bubble of world around them; a name he hadn't used in a very long time. There was no fighting, no sound of gunfire and explosions, no busy shuffle of people in a hurry, no whispers with the ever present tinge of fear. All of that seemed far away, like this was no longer part of that world. The peace, John thought, of a graveyard.

They made it to the town without incident and without speaking. A hidden sun was flooding the white world with colorless light that steadily grew brighter, enhanced by the reflective qualities of the snow. It was time to turn in, yet John made the decision to keep walking until they reached the house where they had spend the day on their way to the community. The town had been free of machines when they first came and he trusted his instincts that said it still was.

Their shelter was located in the basement of a two story building near the town's center. The air smelled dank and the ceiling was so low that the tallest of them had to bow their heads, but there was an old couch in a corner that three people could sit on and it protected them from sight. Once the hatch to the outside was firmly shut, they turned on their flashlights, though only long enough to light the oil lamp in the corner in order to preserve battery power.

Six of them settled down to rest while Evie climbed up the stairs into the empty house above for first watch. She took one of the new guys with her, presumably to show the woman what to consider while on the look out for machines. John didn't actually think that was necessary, as that woman had survived as a scavenger all her life and avoiding machines was, by definition, what they did, but he appreciated the thought anyway. One way or another, even if they knew how to handle their guns, the new ones had much to learn and little time to learn it.

John settled on the floor beside the couch and unscrewed one of their remaining water bottles. The thermos bottle with the hot coffee they'd gotten from the scavengers was long since empty and this water was so cold it seemed to freeze him from the inside. Hernandez distributed insulation mats and blanket and thus they would spend the day. Or at least the part of the day they weren't on watch for.

It was nice not to be walking anymore. John tried to focus on the pleasant aspects of their stay in this basement, and right now not being off his feet was about the best thing he could find about it. For a moment he closed his eyes, thinking. One of the new recruits was familiar with this town and had told them that there were better hiding places further south. He would have showed them but the sun had been rising and they had stored some of their provisions here before. Still, it was a useful information and John would send the man with the next team going in this direction. It always payed to have someone who was familiar with the area.

Something cold and wet touched his hand and made him open his eyes. Round brown eyes looked back at him quizzically and the dog whined softly, demanding attention. After a second, John scratched her behind the ears until she settled down beside him. Soon after that he felt the extra warmth seep through his pants where their bodies touched and wondered distantly why he had waited so long for this.

On the couch, Hernandez bent down to pick up one of the four half-grown puppies and lifted it onto his lap. “Not that these aren't cute,” he commented, “but unless you want a new food source, they're gonna be quite the opposite of that.”

Ah, yes. That was the reason. Dogs ate. And so far they hadn't needed them.

“Or are you planning on training them in armed combat?”

“That was the idea. You'll be their sparring partner.”

“Hear him talk,” Hernandez said to the dog. “He actually thinks you could hurt me, you little useless fluff ball.”

John hoped his friend didn't actually think that this dog was supposed to be a pet. He knew Hernandez had had at least three dogs growing up in a better world, and now he wondered how much nostalgia he could allow the older man before he lost himself in sentimentalities.

The dog licked Hernandez's face. John sighed.

Meanwhile, the three new ones were watching them with insecurity and surprise, as if now that they had a moment to really look at their companions they weren't quite what they had expected. John knew people tended to think of him as larger than life and sometimes they were disappointed when they saw him sit in a dank basement scratching a dog. He preferred that to those who just kept stating at him like he would start to glow and levitate at any moment, no matter where he sat or what he scratched.

Sam, on the other hand, was watching the young dogs who were playing at her feet. Having been born after Judgment Day, the only animals she was familiar with were rats. She, too, was at a risk of forming an inappropriate emotional bond with the new additions to their head quarters. Even John, who did his best to remain emotionally detached, had to admit that it was nice, being with a friendly dog again.

The four former scavs, however, were used to being around dogs, as their community had been breeding them for years. The dogs were used for the search of useful items, but also to alert them if anyone else was in the vicinity – either machines or other scavengers, as meetings between different groups occasionally turned violent. John frowned at the thought. One would think people already had enough things to kill them out there without doing that to each other, too.

“Have you had a dog growing up, General?” Sam asked suddenly. She was watching the puppies with one eye and John and the grown dog – not actually the puppies' mother, they had been told – with the other. “Listening to my granddad you'd think everyone had one, before the war.”

John laughed softly. “There was this picturesque ideal of what a perfect family had to be like, and somehow that included a house with a lawn, a white picket fence, and a dog,” he told her. It sounded ridiculous, now more than ever, and Sam probably couldn't even imagine how people could put such importance on things that went beyond food, shelter, and the opportunity to scrub the dirt off their skin once a week. He decided not to mention swimming pools. “Of course my mother was following a different ideal even then. But yes, we did have dogs all the time when we grew up. They weren't pets, though.”

“What's a pet?” one of the young new ones asked – Clara, if John remembered correctly. She looked shocked a second later, like she couldn't believe she had just asked him a question. On the couch, Hernandez snorted in amusement.

John answered the question as if he hadn't noticed her reaction. “A pet is an animal you keep as a friend – not for practical purposes, but because you like it. They tended to be quite pampered. People had competitions on who had the prettiest.” The last he added just to mess with her, and Hernandez looked at him like he knew that. “What?” John asked, meeting his gaze. “They did.”

“Granddad told me about that,” Sam told everyone. “His wife had a little dog that she took to competitions and they had a wall full of ribbons it won.”

The girl looked honestly lost now, and a little like she thought this was a joke but didn't dare to say anything more. So John decided to be nice and put her out of her misery. “Our dogs were never like that,” he told her. “They were working dogs like these.” At this point he threw a look at Hernandez, who ignored him in favor of the half-puppy settling on his lap. “Mom trained them to attack anyone who threatened me or her, and they warned us whenever there was something out of the ordinary. I lost count of how many times they saved our asses.”

“I thought you grew up before the machines. What could threaten you there?” Clara asked, and now it was Eric, one of the older ones to just join them, who snorted. John silently agreed. Somehow, the kids growing up after the war had come to think that pre-war America was a paradise in which everyone was happy and there was no evil or danger. Considering that those who had been there tended to paint the past in pretty colors, that wasn't actually surprising. And the level of terribleness in the world had gone up so much that what was bad before didn't seem to matter much in retrospect.

But the world hadn't perfect, pain and suffering had existed before the machines, and no one's life had been as easy as the stories would have the young ones believe.

Never mind the fact that John's life had been dominated and determined by the machines since before he'd been born.

“There were plenty of dangers around even then,” he told the girl. “And my mother seemed to seek them all out on purpose.”

“John's mother taught him everything he knows about fighting and organizing people and stuff,” Sam told Clara, who looked at her sceptically. “We wouldn't even be here without her.”

“Everything?” Clara echoed. “How could she know about that?”

“People knew how to fight and had need for organizing that fight even before the machines came,” Hernandez threw in. He would know. John added: “My mother feared that things would get bad and wanted me to be prepared. Not just so I would survive but so I could help everyone else as well. So yeah, we do all own her plenty.”

Now Clara looked vaguely impressed. John tended to forget that there were people out there who hadn't heard of his mother yet. These days, in the bunkers, it seemed she was everywhere.

Silence fell soon after, when everyone tried to find a good position to sleep. It wasn't hard for the soldiers, as they all were used to sleeping wherever they could whenever they could. The scavs didn't complain either. Most of them had gone on long trips through the ruins several times in their past life, looking for usable stuff and sleeping in whatever hole they thought would shelter them for the duration. Only Clara seemed to have trouble finding a comfortable position, but she didn't complain either, doing her best to keep up with everyone else in every way.

John dozed until Evie and the woman whose name he didn't know returned from their watch. He took the second and last one. The days were still short and dark enough that they wouldn't need to hide for more than a few more hours, and while rest was nice, they would all rest much easier once they were back at the base.

Hernandez, he couldn't help but notice, was sleeping with the young dog curled in his arms and John frowned in disapproval. He had hoped his friend was only playing up his affection for the animal to mess with him, but he seemed honestly attached now, and that wasn't good. Because he had to know better than to think he could keep that one as a lap dog, and because now John had to be the asshole who had to tell him that he couldn't.

Hernandez was not a child and it shouldn't be a problem. But he had _lost_ a child recently, his only child, Pablo, who had been killed in action earlier this year. When the boy had joined the army, Hernandez and Pablo had made the conscious decision not to have the son in the unit co-commanded by the father; now Hernandez was left forever to wonder whether his son would have lived had he been there to protect him. It was a question better left unanswered. (Although they all knew that, given the fact that there had been no fatalities at all in Connor's unit in ten months, the answer was most likely Yes.”

Almost miraculously, Hernandez's wife Ana had discovered she was pregnant just days after her son's death, after years of trying in vain. While he never commented on it, John knew that his friend saw it as a sign that their child was somehow returning to them. After twenty years of friendship, he had been able to see it in Hernandez's face when he talked about the new baby, in the way the joy at the prospect replaced the grief rather than just lessening it. John had never known him to be particularly spiritual, but people coped whatever way they could.

But Ana was past her prime and living a life of deprivation. Her body couldn't handle the pregnancy and in the end Kate had managed to talk her into an abortion before it killed her. These days Hernandez was acting more cheerful than John had ever seen him but he knew that underneath the relaxed demeanor, his friend was in a pit of grief and depression that he was only very slowly crawling out of. So if it made him happy to have a puppy to cuddle, then John should just goddamn let him.

Except there were countless people who had lost their children to this war. And these dogs were, right now, a precious resource, and if John just let Hernandez have one, people would ask, and rightfully so, what made his friend's grief so special.

And the answer was Nothing. There was nothing any more or less special about Hernandez's grief than about that of anyone else. All of that loss was the same and all around and yet all of it was unique and isolated, where everyone had to deal with it on their own. John couldn't make special allowances for Hernandez just because the man was his friend and had supported him and the army unwaveringly for decades.

So had other people, the names of most of whom John didn't even know. He couldn't do for his friend what he wouldn't do for anyone. That was how it worked.

 _But those people you don't know have other friends_ _who_ _are there for them and would do anything to help them deal with their loss,_ a voice whispered in his mind. _Doesn't Hernandez deserve the same?_

He did, but it wasn't that easy. It was never easy in any way. Nothing ever was.

For the moment, John left man and animal in peace and slipped up the stairs, finding his way onto the top floor of the family home. One of the reasons why they had chosen this house as a hide-out was the fact that it overlooked the street, with few obstacle blocking the view in all directions. The only thing keeping John from seeing everywhere at once was the house itself; in order to check out the entire surroundings, he had to slowly make his way through all the rooms on the top floor, looking out of every window for a while before moving to the next.

Two or more people could do a better job of it. That they had agreed that one person at a time was enough of a watch showed how little anyone actually expected anything but them to be here.

The continent was big, after all. And there were only so many machines.

The world behind the class was silent – untouched and peaceful. Snow covered everything like a blanket or a shroud. No, not a blanket. No two equal choices here. The snow lay atop many people, now invisible to the eye that only saw the pristine surface, and none of them were sleeping.

Their ride was hidden out there as well, not far from here. It was hidden in a garage, the tracks it had left long vanished underneath the fresh snow that had been falling the night they came here. It would take them back to the bunker, all of them, offering just enough room for the dogs, and the people that had not been expected to join them.

Not a car as such, but a vehicle moving on chain-wheels over the snow that was too deep for cars to move, out here where no one would clear the roads of snow and doing so would give them away. The wind made travel across open land easier, except in the places where it had formed the snow into dams and waves like a frozen sea that was waiting to drown them. The year before had been the coldest in ten, and the snow had not thawed at all on even one single day. Now, in early April 2018, John had little hope that this year would be any better. Here, inside the house looking out onto a town like the village in a snow globe, the work camps of the machines seemed far away and unreal, but he thought of them anyway and wondered how many of the people in there had been taken by the cold.

They were taken by the cold every year. Now, there no longer was a reprieve between one period of freezing and the next.

Again his thoughts wandered, unbidden, to his father. Wondering where he was. There weren't many work camps left, so the chances that he would be, or would end up eventually, in the one in California were rather high. No guarantees, though. John tried not to think about it. The camp in L.A. was their next big mission and he could allow no personal feelings of any kind in regard to it. It might make him impatient, and that might lead to mistakes and get people killed.

It was not like he could change anything about what happened. Or could he? Not for the first time John was overcome by gnawing doubt, and helplessness in the face of a future that seemed inevitable and yet so breakable. In the end, he could do nothing but what seemed best at any given time, and that was why he tried not to think of it too much. It didn't help.

He didn't even know if Reese was really going to be in the camp that gave him his burned-in bar code tattoo as a helpless prisoner. Quite possible that he'd be, one day, one of the soldiers who let themselves be captured to infiltrate the place and get in contact with the prisoners. John's mother had never indicated anything like that, but she hadn't known that was even something that people would be doing. Perhaps she had simply misinterpreted his words and gestures due to lack of information. John sincerely hoped so. Except he didn't, because in order for it to be true there would still have to be camps around when Reese was old enough to be assigned that kind of mission, and that was something John didn't hope at all.

Movement outside the window made him start, but it was only snow, having been whirled up by a sudden gust of wind. The weather was getting worse by the look of it, and John was glad that their transport was not far from here. Things would be uncomfortable enough as it was.

That one gust of wind, however, seemed to be the only one for the moment. The snow settled again and so did John's nerves. Sudden movements always made him nervous, just as they did everyone else. In the 98th division someone had gotten himself shot last year for playing a trick on a particularly jumpy comrade with a loaded gun in his hand. John himself tried not to show any kind of nervousness around his men because he knew how much they depended on him being strong and stable, but sometimes it was hard.

Not today, though. If there was one thing the past twenty years had given him, it was a fine-honed instinct on whether the area was clear or not. Here, it was the storm brewing on the distant horizon that set his nerves on edge, the first onset of fresh falling snow, and his dark thoughts about Hernandez and Reese, not the suspicions that there were machines lurking somewhere between these buildings.

 _Nothing here but ghosts_ , he thought as another white chimera of wind and ice drifted past the window.

John turned away from it, went to the next room. This one had once been someone's bedroom. A double-bed still stood in the center of the room, the night tables still beside it. Blankets, pillows, even the mattresses had been taken long ago. The only reason why the frame of the bed was still here was because it was made of something that wouldn't burn. Anything usable had been taken from this place that had once been someone's home. The only things left behind where those that had no value but to those who once lived here. Paintings on the wall. Stuffed animals, thrown carelessly to the ground. A porcelain cat on the windowsill. A picture on the night table, showing two laughing little girls.

 _Ghosts_ , John though.

(Jeanette would turn nine next month. There wouldn't be any gift for her but the fact that all her family were still alive.)

The next room, an office. The desk, gone. The computer, still there but broken. The machines had never been here, then, or at least not since they had started collecting all kinds of electronic devices that they could find several years ago. The sight made John uneasy. It meant Skynet wasn't done with this place.

No reason to get nervous, but a reason to be wary. Chances were they would never even get here, to this insignificant corner of the earth, in the eleven years this war was still going to last.

Even if they did, John and his brass didn't intent to stay in the area for that long. Just long enough to free the L.A. camp. They would stay close to that city, however. John knew that was where Skynet was vulnerable – or would be, one day. That was where the machines would create their time machine, if for no other reason than that the target of their planned assassination was to be found in that same city, forty-five years before.

The others didn't know that and they wouldn't. All they would know was that John Connor wanted as much intelligence on the activities in the greater L.A. area as he could get.

But that was something to worry about later. For now, John was worrying about getting everyone home safe. The storm clouds on the horizon were significantly closer the next time his slow walk took him back to the room looking west. They would be upon them before the sun had set.

John assessed the speed of the storm and made a decision. The risk of being seen was very slim since there was nothing around to see them. Only aerial machines passing this town on the way to somewhere else might spot them, but even if one happened to come this way, the snow that was falling harder and harder now would hide them from the sensors. So John would give it another ten minutes and then he would make everyone leave, well before dusk, so they would be safe inside their armored vehicle when the worst hit them. Otherwise, chances were that they would be hit during the good hour's walk to the garage, or get snowed in here for days.

Sleep was overrated anyway. His mother, if she'd been here, would have agreed.

  


-

  


The camp was dying out. That was what Kyle thought every morning when they assembled for feeding and he compared how many there were of them to how many there used to be. When he saw how many of the hard boards that served as beds here were empty.

There used to be over three hundred people in here, now there were barely a hundred left by Kyle's estimation. (He still couldn't read more than a few simple words but he knew numbers.) The machines didn't do a lot of sorting anymore. They hardly even bothered to shoot those whose bodies were obviously failing them as long as they still dragged themselves to work. With their work force diminished like this, they appeared to have decided that they should get as much use out of anyone as they could before that person dropped dead on their own.

There were fewer people now, but no less work. The machines brought in new transports of dead, frozen bodies regularly, and when they didn't, they brought in transports of garbage. Kyle and the others had to work through the snow and the wind, as long as there was daylight. As always. It didn't matter if they couldn't see anything for all the snow or that frostbite took their fingers and toes. The robots had one pattern in which they worked this camp and it never changed.

Dark shadows moved through the world of snow around him. People, going elsewhere. One sank down, then came up again. Disappeared into the whirl of white, hunched over. Just before the snow and the twilight hid them from view, Kyle saw the shape kneel down again but his shuffling feet hit something underneath the snow and he was distracted. Not that it mattered. He couldn't help them.

Pulling his gloves more securely over his hands he began to dig through the snow until he uncovered the thing he had stepped against. It was a body, frozen solid and buried in snow the way it would never be buried in earth. (Kyle had a distant memory of burying someone, or someone being buried in his presence, under a pile of rocks, and someone else – his father? - telling him that they did it like that because the earth was too hard for anything else. He had a distant memory of sadness, but everything else was lost. Had it been family? Didn't he use to have an uncle? He knew his parents had died later. Strangers, all of them.) The man working with him helped uncover the rest and together they lifted the body onto the sledge. It was stiff all over, which made it easy.

The shape of a person was still kneeling where it had before, not getting up, not falling down. Kyle caught glimpse of it through drifts of snow and steered the sledge in another direction. They had all the camp to cover, after all.

The world had never been bright for as long as he lived, but sometimes, in the snowless weeks in the middle of the year, the sky had been a bit brighter. It was easy to measure time then, by the way the light changed. In winter, it was always the same, just changing between total dark and the dim light of day, the transition so slow and endless that no time at all ever seemed to pass. It was worst when the weather was like this and they couldn't even make out the clouds in the sky for all the snow. The days didn't end. One day was like the other. The cold killed them and all they could do was hope for a day that would be a little bit better.

This winter had been going on for a year. Longer, maybe. Kyle's sense of time had nothing to cling to without the change, however slight, of seasons. No one counted the days.

They found another body not fat from the beds underneath the roof, now deserted as all remaining inmates found room in the containers that had at least three walls to protect them. The tunnels were almost inaccessible now, the hatches frozen shut, the entrances without hatches buried in snow. Some who had found a way inside before it got too bad had never come out again. Now a girl Kyle had not seen in weeks was finally recovered, naked and curled into a ball and long dead. He stood still at first, as if frozen himself, thinking it was Laina, as she was the same age, the same color of hair, but this girl's skin was lighter and she had all her fingers. The face, if Kyle were to remove the ice-crusted hair covering it, would bring the final prove that this wasn't Laina but the other one, whose name he'd never learned. He left the hair where it was and together they lifted the thin body onto the others.

The man Kyle worked with kept muttering under his breath as they did, and the wind carried words like Pity and Shame and Bastards to Kyle's ears. He seemed kind, in a way, and Kyle didn't fear him. Throughout the day the other tried to catch Kyle's eyes, but every time he did Kyle would look somewhere else: to the sky, the ground, in the direction of the fence, now hidden by snow and shadow, behind which they said lay the world. No connection was formed between them.

Finally, when the twilight finally gave way to darkness and the signal to lay down their work and return to the feeding stations and the beds had to sound at any moment, they came back up on the place where Kyle had seen a shadow kneeling on the ground hours before. Now there was a figure in place of the shadow, lying on their side, the wind having blown the snow over it like a blanket. Burying them, slowly, gently. Kyle couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. He thought they looked peaceful and was oddly sad that he had to pull them out of this only grave they were ever going to get.

After work he found Laina in the line to the food basins and joined her out of relief that she was still breathing. She didn't comment on it and didn't send him away. That night they huddled together of her bunk, for warmth and for safety as two half-growns were harder to take on than one. Kyle often thought that all the kids in the camp would have it a lot easier if they managed to stick together and help each other, but most of them sought only solitude and tried to protect themselves by diverting the attention to someone else rather than protecting each other.

Being young and weak, their resting places were far from the fire pots, but it was till far warmer than outside and the wind was at an angle that didn't blow into the container. Between them, they had three blankets, Kyle having managed to get the one meant for the person who had died in the snow today, whose death had not yet been registered. On top of that they had their coats, gloves, and two pair of socks each. Laina was wearing the thin and uncomfortable shoes given out by the machines on top of hers, while Kyle was still wearing the shoes he had gotten from Alex years ago. They were too small now and worn thin. Soon, they would serve him worse than the camp-shoes would and he'd have to exchange them for the pair handed out to him months ago, safely hidden away in the tunnels. Not yet, though. He couldn't have reached that hiding place if he'd wanted to, anyway.

Underneath the blankets they held hands. It was a practical action; there still wasn't much love between them. But the shared body-heat might spare Laina losing any more fingers to the cold, and her resentment didn't run so deep that she wouldn't see the usefulness of having someone near her who wouldn't harm her. Over the years, her dislike of Kyle had mellowed into habit that she wore like a comfortable coat, and while they would never be friends like he had been with Alex, they could co-exist with one another now in a way they couldn't, and wouldn't, with anyone else.

Kyle had never learned the reason why Laina didn't like him. She had never told him, and neither had Alex, who had obviously known. But he knew that Cecilia, the woman who had helped him when he'd been sick and who had died while he was out of it, had been Laina's aunt and the last living member of her family. She obviously blamed Kyle for her death, which had been caused by her getting pregnant while he was ill; it had taken Kyle a long time before he managed to make a connection between those seemingly unrelated events. He'd never asked to get his suspicion confirmed.

Tonight, it didn't matter. Nothing much mattered during the night, except survival. The days weren't much different. Kyle still thought about Connor and his army and the way out, but in this endless winter it seemed impossibly far away. Almost unreal. No one had talked about it in a long time. No one talked much at all. The only sound at night, when the wind wasn't blowing, was the chattering of teeth. The moans of the dying. And sometimes quiet calls for help that were never followed. The nights were long.

If Connor was indeed out there, he would have to fight this weather as much as they did in here, Kyle had realized one day. It was hard to imagine that army at all so it was hard to imagine that anything as trivial as weather could stop them, but when he thought about it, Kyle couldn't see how it wouldn't. It meant that no one would come for them before the winter ended, if it ever did.

Kyle tried not to think about it. At the moment the thought held only despair. They waited through the night, got some rest even, due to the exhaustion and the fact that in this cold weather what people fought for was mostly the best place near a fire pot and who got one would not leave it for any reason. The next day continued as the previous had been. It was still snowing. The wind was still blowing. People still died.

It seemed like forever since Alex had been alive. Kyle didn't know how much time had passed since he'd last seen his friend. He didn't know what year it was. It had been the year 2017 when they had waited for the snow to stop and it didn't happen. So certainly it was 2018 yet? Kyle wasn't sure. It felt like a long time, though – too long to fit into one year. Maybe it was 2019 already. He didn't think so but it also didn't matter. Time had no meaning anymore. Even before it had only mattered in the distance from one summer to the next, and in the centimeters they grew towards the goal of being less helpless.

The day after, three things happened that did make difference. For one, it stopped snowing. While the snow had been falling all through the night, it had lessened in the morning and by noon it was gone. The wind died. It didn't get warmer, not even much brighter, but it made their lives a little bit easier.

The second thing was the arrival of another transport. They had been coming and going all through the last months, as they always did, but for a long time they had delivered nothing living to the camp. This time the door opened and people streamed out of the dark cabin that marked the starting point of Kyle's world. Men and women, no small children this time. Thin and dirty but not as thin and dirty as them. Scared. From the distance, Kyle made out two girls, a little older perhaps than Alex had been, clinging to each other as they walked towards the assessment point. Everyone else seemed to be already alone.

If they were scared of being found wanting and sorted out, they needn't have been. If they were scared of this place, they were right to. No one was sorted this time. Everyone was marked and send down to the other workers. The only person that went straight to processing was a man carried out of the transporter already dead.

Two more of the new arrivals didn't make it through the day. One died suddenly: took a sharp-edged piece of garbage and stuck it into his own throat. The second one tried to escape by other means. That was where the third significant thing happened, the one that didn't matter to anyone but Kyle.

It happened around mid-day, while Kyle was busy fumbling with the sledge that had become wedged awkwardly in the narrow opening leading to the area where they tried to pry the clothes off the frozen bodies. There was yelling, then more yelling. Startled shouts. Kyle looked up to see a man, one of the new arrivals, sprint past his station towards the fence. There was a bot in his way, one of the smaller ones that only served to shoot everyone who got past a certain line, but the bot didn't shoot because the man hadn't crossed the line yet. At the last second the man changed directions and jumped the bot. He grabbed the arm with the weapon mounted to it and twisted it back until everyone heard the sound of something snapping in the mechanical joint. Kyle found himself impressed. He hadn't known that was possible. It seemed that this man knew what he was doing.

And it seemed like he had a chance, but only to those unfamiliar with this place. Kyle knew he didn't, knew the turret half-hidden on top of the barrack the stranger was just running past would get him the moment he touched the fence that only _looked_ unprotected at this point. And yet, he was seconds away from just dropping everything he held and running after the man.

The impulse died when two more bots appeared in front of the prisoner, as if from thin air, and lifted their weapon arms. The man turned away, ran back, and tried to jump out of the line of fire, displaying a strength and agility Kyle had not seen in anyone in years. This place would have sucked that out of him anyway, he thought distantly as bullets hit flesh and the man hit the ground with a strangled cry. He must have known that he wouldn't get far. At least Kyle hoped he had; that this was the outcome he had been going for. Or, at the very least, an outcome he had expected. No one escaped, ever.

At least he had gone down trying. At this moment, what Kyle felt for him, more than anything, was envy.

But it wasn't over yet. The man wasn't dead. He was bleeding in the snow, still moving. Slowly crawling away, driven by instinct now rather than purpose. The machines that shot him were still there and Kyle waited for them to finish it, but they didn't. And eventually he understood that they wouldn't. The man was no longer a danger nor was there a chance that he would escape. He was dying. Speeding the process along would be a waste of bullets. With cold efficiency the machines were waiting for him to die on his own.

And Kyle knew from experience how long that could take.

People watched it happen as they passed, then move on. No one interfered. Kyle couldn't move away, he was working right in front of the dying man, not twenty meters away. Heard the moans. Saw how the movements grew weaker and lost direction, until the man lay on his back and stared at the sky, still moaning, still moving but, perhaps, no longer aware that he was doing it.

Suffering and dying in his own time. The only freedom he had brought for himself, in the end.

After a while his breath turned wheezing and then he started to cough blood. Kyle looked away but even when the man was silent, he couldn't turn his thoughts away from him. He kept working, because he would end up just like that if he stopped, as something that lay bleeding in the snow and wheezed.

But eventually his work was finished and the man was still lying there, gurgling, still suffering while the two machines watched like it was a vaguely interesting experiment. Kyle knew they didn't even care that much.

They didn't care. They were making sure that the man would be dead, and they weren't going to waste any more bullets on something that didn't need any more bullets. Kyle was sitting on the edge of the sledge that had held the frozen corpses, now naked and loaded onto another sledge that would take them to the pit or the barracks. There was a slight downward slope so two stones had been placed before the skis the sledge was mounted on, to keep it from sliding off while still empty. Kyle picked up one now. It was about the size of both his firsts. It was very heavy.

The machines watched, but didn't do anything as he neared the man on the ground on legs that felt weak and distant, like something only indirectly connected to his body. Kyle didn't look at them. He knelt beside the fallen man and lifted the rock before he had a chance to think. The man looked at him, and Kyle tried to find something like approval, even gratitude in his eyes, but there was none. There wasn't even fear. The man didn't understand.

And Kyle held the rock up for a long time, for longer than he had thought he could. Unable to bring it down. He wanted to, but he didn't, suddenly filled with something that felt like despair and fear mixed together and just as paralyzing. It would be so easy, just giving in to gravity, but he couldn't do it. Like it wasn't in his programming, he thought, strangely. Wondering if the machines behind him ever wanted to shoot all of them and couldn't because their programming wouldn't let them.

The rock came halfway down again when Kyle's arm seemed to lose all strength and he trembled and almost sobbed.

The man gurgled again, into the cloudy sky. How kind it would have been if he had simply frozen to death. How cruel that this had to happen on a day like this, when the wind was still and no snow was falling, and the cold was seeping through clothes slowly, like an embrace rather than a knife. And the air was so clear and sharp that the wet cracking sound seemed to linger in in the space between the barracks forever when Kyle finally brought the rock down.

After, he stat frozen for a long time. Until he remembered the machines. And he turned around and stared at them and they stared back from the red lights that were their eyes and did nothing. They didn't care. But then they started moving – whirring and clicking, like an audible thought process, and Kyle became aware what he was supposed to do now; what he _had_ to do if he didn't want to be regarded as useless and therefore obsolete.

There was a dead body in the snow. That was his job.

So Kyle got up, took hold of the man's arms, and started pulling.

It wasn't far to where he'd spend all morning pulling clothed off corpses, but this, the transport, was not something he usually did alone. The man was heavy, and it was easier when they were frozen solid. Getting the sledge was out of the question: Kyle wouldn't have managed to get the body on there on his own and he feared the if he moved away from it, the machines would shoot him.

So he threw his full weight into it, tried not to vomit, and expected the machines to shoot him anyway.

Others looked while they walked past him but no one helped.

When he finally made it, when he had pulled the body up the ramp onto the table, he was bathed in sweat that came not only from the exertion. He tried not to look at the gaping wound he had caused, at the way the shape of the face had changed, but couldn't seem to look anywhere else.

 _Blank it out_ , Alex's voice seemed to come from far away, and Kyle did his best. _Focus on the facts, on what's important here and now._ This man was dead. Kyle was not. And this dead, man was wearing shoes from the outside that were far better than anything the machines would give him.

Taking anything off the bodies was forbidden, but once it was done the machines didn't care anymore. The only danger lay in doing it while something watched. No one watched right now and Kyle quickly changed out of his shoes and into the ones he had just pulled off the man he had killed. The new shoes were far too big and not quite as good as Alex's had been when he had first gotten them, but they were definitely better than those were now.

There were other things that he considered taking. He didn't need a new hat; his own was still good and he had only just grown into it so that it fit snugly on his head. The coat, though, that was very good. There was a bullet hole in it now, but it was still better than anything that Kyle had seen in a long time. It was obvious that wherever this man had come from, he had lived very well.

For the first tine, Kyle wondered who this had been. Someone moderately well fed, with good clothes, who knew how to fight machines. His heart sped up when the thought came to him that maybe this was a soldier from the army he'd been waiting for for years. Did that mean the army was close? Close enough for one of them to run into the Collectors?

Perhaps. Fact was, he didn't know. And what he didn't know wouldn't help him. So Kyle shoved the sudden, dangerous hope down to where it came from and concentrated on the reality of the task he was performing. Taking the coat would be dangerous, as he could hear the whirr of a bot patrolling nearby, and besides, this was the kind of coat people would kill for. Kyle's own wasn't so bad he would risk it. He pulled the cap off the stranger's head and stuffed it into his pockets. The coat went on the pile for the machines, and while Kyle struggled with the man's pants and undershirt someone came in and took it. When he turned around, it was gone. Kyle noted it without surprise and even some kind of relief that this one wasn't going to waste.

He just hoped it had been taken by someone who wouldn't die for it.

But that had nothing to do with him. Kyle finished with the body, rolled it down the other side and onto the other sledge, and then he was finished and went to find something else to do before he was assigned another task he hated.

He was lucky. Much garbage from the wast land had come with the last transporter. Cushions, lengths of fabric of all kinds, clothes, little figures someone had once told him were toys. Splinters of wood. Electronics, some of them also toys, or if they weren't, Kyle couldn't figure out what they were. A lot of utensils he couldn't even begin to fathom the purpose of. Toothbrushes. Kyle knew those. The machines allowed them some hygiene of the mouth to keep them from dying of infection or starvation when their teeth rotted out.

All stuff from houses where people had lived. There was a small metal cage in there, and when Kyle picked it up a collection of bones fell through the bars. There also were a lot of books. Some of them half-burned, most damaged by water, with the pages sticking together inseparably. Kyle managed to read a few titles, ones that weren't too long or complicated. He stuffed two written works, a little book no bigger than his palm and a thin, bendy magazine, into his coat when no one was looking.

At night, after work, he didn't seek out Laina, nor she him. With the tunnels being inaccessible, he retreated back to where now many of the beds were empty. He climbed up onto one of the top bunks, where he tore apart the magazine and stuffed the crumbled paper into his oversized shoes until he had filled all the empty space. Then he pulled out the little book and tried to read it. He got the title. The letters inside were big, and when he had seen that he had hoped that it would be somewhat easy to decipher.

If nothing else, it would be distracting.

But this far from the fire pots, there just wasn't enough light to make out much, even with the big letters. Perhaps if he had known more words and were more familiar with the letters, he could have managed, but as it was, everything swam together in the dark and nothing made sense. He tried anyway, until his head hurt. Until tears streamed down his face. When he finally gave up, he curled into a ball where he was, pulled the blanket over his head, and fought nightmares for the rest of the night.

  



	13. 2018 - 2/3

In the end, Hernandez gave up the dog without a fight. John never had to have that discussion with him. They arrived at the bunker, unloaded their supplies in the protection of the still ongoing snow storm, and then Hernandez handed the leash of the puppy he had been cuddling all the way back home wordlessly to a man named Henry who was awaiting them at the entrance and took the new recruits into the bowls of their new home to show them around. John was relieved, but also almost disappointed. He needed a moment before he understood that it was because the moment was lacking catharsis. It felt unfinished, like nothing had changed.

But this was not the moment to worry about that. (It never was.) John took on the remaining dogs and turned to Henry, who had been in charge of preparing a place for the dogs to stay. Henry had been a soldier once, one of the first, but had had to drop out of the army after losing his foot in a battle. Kate had recognized his organizational skills even before he had left her clinic and had turned him into her right hand when it came to keeping their head quarters going in all things not related to battle. His time in the army still showed in his bearings whenever he dealt with John or any of the other brass, but if he missed getting shot at in the ruins, he never showed it.

“Are those all, Sir?” he asked when John approached him with the rest of the bunch, and the leader of mankind needed a moment to recognize the hint of sarcasm in his voice.

“We marked those who are related to one another and those who are not, so we can breed if you feel these aren't enough,” John assured him. “In fact, we _will_ breed them. That's kind of the point.”

“How many dogs, exactly, do you think we'll need?” Henry knelt down to pat the head of the young one Hernandez had given him, but he sounded doubtful. So far there was not a reason for even one dog. They couldn't fight machines who were notoriously unimpressed by biting, and they would take up space and food. They could also become a food source in an emergency, but people tended to form bonds with them, and then morale went down if they ended up as a side dish.

“More,” John just said. “I want every base to have a few. We might need them.”

“And if we don't?” Everyone knew John's reason for this precaution, but not everyone saw the point. He didn't know if it was true disbelief or a refusal to entertain the thought of infiltration units that imitated humans.

“Then we can still eat them,” John promised, and Henry, Master of Provisions, was satisfied.

John wanted to go check on his family, but the kennel set up for the dogs was on the way and he wanted to see it and make sure that in the next weeks the animals would be trained in the ways they needed them to be. Aside from sniffing out terminators, John hoped that they would also sniff out rats and other things that either presented a health risk or were edible.

“How's Kate?” he asked as they walked through the corridors. Henry would know, and John worried whenever he was away. “And the girls?”

“Kate's fine,” the older man assured him. “Lousia has a bit of a cold, but Kate doesn't think it's anything more than that. She still put her in isolation until it gets better.”

John kept his face blank as he listened, yet his stomach turned into a cold knot at the words. It could be just a little cold. It could be more than that. Louisa could be dead tomorrow. He could have come back to find that everyone in this bunker had died of a viral outbreak, or an attack they couldn't stop. He worried when he was away. Knowing that technically he couldn't die before the year 2029, he was constantly aware that this did not extent to his family. Reese had never mentioned Kate or the girls to John's mother, and John did not know why. Perhaps it just hadn't come up. They had had different things to focus on, like staying alive. And Sarah was struggling enough with the idea of her future son – maybe Reese didn't think she needed to know about her future granddaughters as well. Or he hadn't mentioned them because he had never met them; because they weren't around anymore when Reese met John.

Or he ha mentioned them and Sarah had decided that whatever he had told her was not something John should know.

So he worried. And felt helpless. Somehow, this sense of immortality given to him by the prophecies of his father made everyone else seem painfully vulnerable. Fleeting.

So after seeing the dogs to their new home and talking a little to Caroline Hyms, an older lady who once had been involved in the training of police dogs, John made his way to medical. With any luck, Kate would be there, too.

But he wasn't in luck. Kate wasn't in. Only Hannah, and Jim, a teenager who had been drafted into helping with the survivors of one of the liberated camps a few years ago and had subsequently decided to stay. Pretty continuously, that was. John knew that the kid had lost his last remaining relative, an uncle, to a failed mission not long ago and now more or less lived in Kate's clinic. It actually worked for the benefit of everyone, as it meant that there was always someone there if they were needed.

When John came in, Jim was sleeping on a cot between the small desk where Kate filled the few papers they had here and the cabinet where she kept them. Most of the medication was stored in a locked box in Kate's and John's lockable room, with only the bare minimum actually here, and even that was locked away in a drawer of the metal desk that only Kate, Giselle, Hannah, and Hank had a key to. Right now, Hannah was sitting behind the desk, flipping through papers. There was a book turned upside down on the table in front of her. It seemed to be a slow night.

She looked up when John came in. “General,” she greeted him. “You're here for Louisa? Doctor Brewster took her back to your room an hour ago.”

Always formal and straight to the point. John gave her a genuine smile. “Thank you, Doctor,” he returned, and turned to leave, relived. Kate wouldn't have taken Lou if the girl hadn't been better.

It was late. Or early, depending on how one looked at it. Life in the bunker was pretty much nocturnal because the soldiers operated primarily at night when they were just that little bit safer from the machines and everyone else adjusted to their rhythm since underground it didn't matter much anyway whether the sun was up outside or not. Many of those who lived here hadn't seen the sky since they moved in a year ago. John had seen people, young and old, who recoiled from the openness of the world when forced the to leave the base they lived in for a relocation. For some it was the memory of the war that had left the world in this sate, of the bombs falling from above. For some it was fear of aerial HKs. For all it was the loss of the safety associated with walls.

John's own children barely knew the outside. Jeannie couldn't await to go out and hunt killerbots in the ruins. Lou was a lot less enthusiastic about the prospect of leaving their bunkers.

John didn't know how Kate felt about being locked down there all the time. He assumed she didn't have time to think about it much, but she still had to have an opinion, and he didn't know it. Years ago she had been yearning for the sky. Had that changed? Was the fear associated with ground level stronger now? They hadn't talked in far too long, he thought sadly. Not really. There was no time for it, it seemed. Ever.

They would make up for it when the war was over. In eleven years. They would – everyone would – make up for so much then. There would be so much to regret if Kate didn't live to see it.

Being responsible forced John to have his priorities in line. He didn't regret his position, as such. He just sometimes wished he didn't have it.

Every time he refused to put his own needs and wishes first, as he had to, he also denied those he loved things that others could take for granted. His undivided attention. His presence when they needed him. Him doing everything he could for them before anyone else. Kate, the girls, Hernandez... His mother had never warned him it would be like this. (Sometimes he wondered if the kids had been a mistake. Never when he was with them, though.)

Perhaps she had thought that he could figure it out himself from the way she had forced them to live their lives.

In his more melodramatic moments, It felt like a curse that was lying on his entire family and everyone he loved. A curse he had brought down on them. His curse.

Even though John tried to be there for all of this men and they rarely hesitated to come to him with problems, he knew that behind his back they talked about him being distant, about the fact that he didn't seem to want to have any actual friends. About the special status Hernandez seemed to be given with John's friendship. They didn't understand that every time John Connor refused to get close to someone they dodged a bullet.

Now John had an opportunity. Not to make up for anything, but to, perhaps, seize the moment that he had. He'd go to their room, where all his family was, and leave everything else outside for as long as it would stay there. At this point, he thought, Kate and the girls were probably asleep, and he smiled at the idea of just crawling into bed with them and enjoying their warmth and presence for a while as he drifted to sleep. Simple pleasures. They rarely left room for him on the mattress they slept on, not expecting him to show up, but when Louisa slept, an explosion couldn't wake her, so he could just move the arrangement until he fit.

Anticipation made him speed up his steps on the way through the corridors. The deep-ingrained paranoia that if he lingered too long, something would come up to keep him from his goal – not without reason, as that was what usually happened. Still, John decided to make a brief stop at the restrooms to relieve himself and get the worst of the sweat and grime off his body. Clean sheets were a hard commodity to come by, and Kate was never thrilled if the girls got them dirty. She would have _words_ with John if he did it, once they had the time (Kate had a fine memory for this kind of thing if she wanted to), and if they did have the time for words, these were not the words John wanted to share with her.

It was one of the things that reminded him of his own mother time and time again, this attempt to keep things clean and neat. Not that either Sarah or Kate were fanatical about cleanliness; Kate, especially, wouldn't have survived in this world if she were. But they were always making points about not living in garbage if they didn't have to, about refraining from getting stuff dirty if it could be avoided by not being a lazy bastard.

Once, John might have thought it was a female thing, but most soldiers he knew who were also women were about as enthusiastic about getting cleaned up or changing out of dirty clothes before falling into bed as he was. With Kate, he suspected that, aside from simple reasons of hygiene and health, it was an attempt to hold on to the last bit of civilization she carried deep in her being. Maybe a memory of how her own mother had raised her in a better life. Something she wanted to preserve and pass on.

With Sarah, it was even more simple that that, even if John hadn't understood it at the time. She must have known, even if she'd never admitted it, that there was a chance her mission to prevent Skynet would fail, and wanted her son to be able to sleep on clean sheets, to eat at a table, to wear socks without holes in them, for as long as he could.

She'd had that thing about flowers...

John arrived at the door. It was closed, most likely locked. No light fell in from underneath it, so everyone was probably asleep, as he had already predicted. He pictured the now: Kate, with her hair loose from its ponytail and fanning the pillow (she always wore it either long enough to be tied back or short enough not to get in the way and got annoyed in the time in between when strands always escaped the tie and fell into her face because she hated headbands), probably curled protectively around her sick child, sleeping lightly, occasionally waking up and checking for fever. Jeanette, with her mother's coloring and her grandmother's face (“I don't have a picture of my mom,” Kate had once told him. “Now I don't need one anymore.”), sleeping on her back with her arm thrown over her eyes the way she always did when she went to sleep while the light was still on. And black-haired Louisa, who according to Kate looked just like a female version of John, wedged between them and curled into the sister she always, unsurprisingly, seemed to prefer over any of her parents. John imagined them, peaceful and, for the moment, safe, with his hand on the door handle, in the silence of the base.

After a long moment, he let go of the handle and turned away.

Miller looked up when John entered the command center. He was alone, an old man in a wheelchair that barely fit through the doors here and capitulated in front of the numerous steps. Someone should have been with him at all times to help him navigate this place, but it wasn't unusual to find him on his own in this room, especially at this time. The bunker didn't really have a sleep period – something was going on at all times, units came and went at all hours, but sometimes things just calmed down and everyone noticed how tired they were. That was night. That was now.

Miller had lost both his legs long ago. He had tried to kill himself twice but Kate had saved him both times, angrier than John had ever seen her back in the day, and eventually he had ended up in the command center of every head quarters the army had ever had afterward, handling communication with the different units out in the ruins and coordinating their movements. John had spend a lot of time with him in the last ten years and had come to respect his opinion going over plans and tactics.

They weren't friends – nothing was shared between them that didn't involve military decisions, but John knew the old man was happy to spend all his time here because he had nothing else.

“Heard you were back, boss,” Miller grunted instead of a greeting. “Didn't expect to see you here so soon.”

“No time like the present,” John replied, not feeling like explaining anything and knowing no explanation was expected. “Anything worthwhile on the comms?”

Miller shook his head. “It's dawn out. Everyone's laying low.”

“Good. We'll have some time, then. I came here for a reason.”

“Figures.”

It wasn't as obvious as Miller made it sound. John came here when he needed to discuss something or there was a mission that he had a specific interest in to supervise. If that was the case, however, he was usually on that mission himself or on another one that kept him away from it. John only took over the coordination over the comm when something unforseen happened or he had to take care of several missions at once.

But he also came at other occasions when time allowed it. Simply to listen in to the radio, hear how his men were doing. Sometimes to talk to them. Even if there were no orders and no intel to give, he had found that it lifted the spirits of those out in the filed if he let them know he was there and interested in their survival. So he did that as often as he could. As with most things in his life that weren't directly linked to survival, it wasn't very often at all.

If he had come for this, though, he would have come at another hour. Right now, who was in a position to sleep slept. On the other hand, those on watch duty were usually happy for the company. Once John had had a very long and pleasant talk with a woman called Corporal Stella Jordan in Dakota, later joined by one Private Ben Tucker. At the end of that he had known the two of them better than many from his own unit, yet he had never met them in person. (He had asked about them the next time he had contact with their commander and learned that both were gone now, like so many.)

Without another word, John walked over to the table where maps and documents where lying around in something that only at first sight looked like a disorganized mess. He quickly scanned the markings on the map in the center, taking in the changes that had happened since his departure, and finding nothing that needed his immediate attention. They had several units deep in the L.A. zone, still controlled relentlessly by the machines. Scouting out the area but not yet making themselves known if they didn't have to. One day John wanted to move their HQ into the outskirts of that city, but that day was still lightyears away. As of now, it would get everyone killed very quickly. Los Angeles, the city both his mother and his wife had grown up in, was one of the strongest bastions of the machines.

With good reason. Somewhere in there, Skynet was vulnerable. And John wanted to know where, and how.

But that was not what he was here for right now. It something that would need time, a process in the making, and John would have known it even if he hadn't known how far away their victory still was. Eleven years. His father's life was now half over.

Nothing happened quickly here, except disaster. Every step they took towards defeating the machines took careful planning and preparation and more often the not up to fifteen steps back. It was slow going and sometimes John struggled to find the patience he needed for this while also giving everyone else hope.

And for hope, victories were important. The big ones had to be acknowledged, the sacrifices made for the small ones honored. Equally, the set backs and defeats had to be overcome, but there hadn't been many of that lately. Things had been going well since the taking over of the refinery in Page two years ago. It truly felt like they had passed some invisible marker that day that said that the worst was over, but on a personal level John knew it wasn't so, and on a general level he had grown too paranoid to trust the streak of luck.

Grown paranoid. He nearly snorted. There had been no need to develop paranoia for him. He had grown up looking over his shoulder.

But maybe that wasn't the right image to use. John had grown up squinting ahead, peering carefully around every corner, and fearing the shadows that lay in the direction he was going. It was his mother who had always had one eye on the past, never seeing what was in front of her.

The old resentment was long gone. Still, John didn't entirely know how he felt about meeting his father – the man who had kept his mother from seeing anything beside his face in her dreams and a very narrow line of the future. The person who had determined everything in John's childhood directly or indirectly and who, for all he knew, had never even really existed. Sara and Reese had known each other for hours. One could not learn a person in that short amount of time.

It had been a bleak day of John's childhood when he had realized that the person his mother was so in love with was someone she had all but made up, her imagination filling in the blanks to make up for the fact that she never really knew him.

As much as his memory had weighed John down as a child, to that day he had always found in comfort in the fact that at least his parents had loved each other. Now, the closer he got to the point where he would actually meet his father the more he dreaded it. What if the person Reese really was, rather than the one Sara had made up, wasn't someone she would have liked? It wasn't just John's own expectations the man had a chance of not living up to. To think that his mother might have clung all her life to the memory of a guy who wasn't worth it....

And on the other side of things, Reese didn't know Sara either. Knew nothing of her bad sides, the small petty things, the impatience that used to drive John crazy, the way she never seemed to listen to his side of an argument... No, he would only know some idealized picture that had all her good sides but only half the person John used to know. Not because he made it up for lack of facts but because John would present her like that so Reese would go and die for both of them.

John pushed the thought aside, but it lingered in the back of his mind where it would stay until it found an opportunity to crawl out again. John had learned to live with it like others lived with chronic illnesses. Like Miller had learned to live without his legs.

“I need everything you have on the L.A. camp,” John told the old man. “Layout, defenses, number of inmates, and bots. Everything. I need a map of the area as well and everything on the activities of the machines in the city.”

“I can tell you all about the activity in L.A.,” Miller remarked even as he pulled out the relevant files. “There's too much of it. If we got for the camp, they'll smash us from all sides.”

“We can't lure them away to take care of the camp while the enemy forces are busy elsewhere,” John explained. He was well familiar with the situation in Los Angeles, but it helped to have it all spread out in front of him anyway. “The machines would see right through that and just obliterate the camp if them thought we might actually have a chance to take it from them.” That was a tactic that could only be used once, and that one time had come and gone. An attempt to repeat that trick in Maryland had gone horribly wrong and resulted in the death of hundreds.

“So what's the plan, boss?” Miller wanted to know. He seemed to expect John to actually have a plan, to have come here with a specific goal in mind, and he was right. It wasn't a good plan yet, but one that John was already working on.

“By now Skynet knows we're aiming to free all the camps,” he mused.

“Well, if it doesn't I'd love to know what it uses all that processing power for.”

John didn't smile because he was too focused on his thoughts for it, but he appreciated the sarcasm. “It must know we're gonna go for the one in L.A., and yet it doesn't do anything about it.”

“So what's that to tell us?”

“It tells us that we are no threat for it. The machines are confident that we can't get that camp as it is, else they would have closed it already.”

“Methinks the machines are right about that.”

“Oh, they are. Good thing, too. Our harmlessness is what's keeping the inmates safe. Of course it's also keeping them inmates.”

“Was just gonna point it out, boss.” Miller hesitated for a moment, distracted. He was still wearing the headphones over one ear to listen in to any communication that might happen over his line, but whatever he was hearing right now, it didn't hold his attention for long. “So what's the plan?”

“The plan is to weaken the forces in the city. Not go in for one big attack but for several small ones, until the machines' resistance is worn down. _Then_ we can go for the camp, when the playing field is even.”

“That would still require things to happen pretty quickly. And there is the problem where, as soon as that point is reached, the bots will cut their losses and set that camp on fire.”

John ha considered that. A lot. “We need to make sure that won't happen,” he stated the obvious. “And I'm afraid that'll be up to the soldiers going in. We need a lot of them to do it this time.” He really hoped this wouldn't go wrong. The losses would be catastrophic, and the blow to morale even worse.

Never mind the fact that his father might be in there somewhere, and getting him killed would just spare Skynet the effort of having to send a terminator back in time in a decade.

“You could send in an entire army and they still wouldn't have any weapons to fight,” Milled pointed out the equally obvious issue.

“That's why we need to arm them. But that's not all. We also need to give them something Skynet wants. And we need to make sure Skynet knows they have it.”

Now Miller blinked at him as if he had gone mad. Maybe he didn't, though. The old man was pretty direct. If he thought his general had lost his mind, he would say so.

“So the machines will be careful about what they shoot and can't level the entire camp at once,” he said slowly, as he figured out the reasoning behind that remark.

“You got it.”

“So what, then?”

“We need to work on that. Information, possibly. In that case we would also need to have the machines learn that someone in the camp knows something they want to know, too. Like where our headquarters are, or how to get through our defenses. We can't let them know who has that information, though, and we'd have to give them a large number of possible candidates who would have to mix with everyone else...” His voice trailed off as he followed that line of thought as it formed.

“I hope you're not really going to give away that kind of information.”

“Most of our soldiers know how to get to HQ, Miller. As for the codes, no, I won't risk that. Still, it'll be a risk anyway to let the machines know that we let people get caught on purpose to get to the inmates.” Somehow, the machines had missed that in the years before. It was one of the few things that worked in the army's favor.

Again, Miller gave him that long look. “When we let those metal bastards know about that, we won't be able to use that tactic ever again,” he warned.

John was well aware of that fact. “There aren't many camps left. We made them unattractive for the machines. Chances are California is going to be the last one we will ever free.”

He fell silent as he let the words sink in. This was something that had been eating away at him for some time now. Chances were indeed that after the next camp was freed, the machines would cut their losses and set all the other ones on fire, figuratively or literally, to keep the prisoners out of the resistance army. Besides L.A., there were five more camps left that they knew about, none of them nearly as big. And John kept wondering – what if they went for a smaller one first? One not as important. Skynet might not take the loss so hard and leave the others alone. They might be able to save those people yet.

But just as likely Skynet wouldn't tolerate the liberation of _any_ other work camp, no matter the size, and by starting small they would sacrifice the large one in California along with all the others. It wasn't just the thought of his father, it was the cold logic of statistic that made the decision for them.

If Reese was even in there. Maybe he was in one of the others, and John was in the process of making the decision that would kill him, and therefore the world.

If he was even in any of them, yet. John caught himself convinced that this heist would go down soon and that it would work, thus ending the work camp system. That was hardly set in stone.

“Well,” Miller said after a long pause. “We better make it worth it, then.”

“Yes.” In his mind, John was already dealing with the timing. They couldn't start with the camp too early, while the presence of the machines in the area around it was still too strong. Then, they would be defeated in their attack. But they couldn't wait too long either, else the machines would grasp that their largest camp was no longer secure and close it. To prevent that they would have to let them know about the soldiers with sensitive information in there, but if they did that too early, the bots would actually have a chance to identify their targets before the attack and it would not only be useless but backfire catastrophically.

At the same time they couldn't wait too long to send their soldiers in. For one, Skynet needed to have a chance to register their presence. And aside from that...

“The attack from the outside isn't going to cut it,” John told his only audience. “The inmates need to help with more that shovels and iron pipes this time. We need to arm them – really arm them. We need a battalion on the inside.”

“So what do you wanna do? Steal an aerial and drop them a bunch of weapons from above?”

John's lips twitched. The things was, he had been entertaining the thought of making a go for one of the flying machines more than once, but it had never been more than a fantasy scenario of his. Being able to fly would have made everything so much easier, but the machines were protected against hijacking like that. They self-destructed the moment something got behind their programming, and since the army had started using EMPs, the aerial HKs had developed a habit of blowing up upon impact when they fell from the sky, even if they were low enough to scrape the roofs of bungalows when they were hit. John Connor and his army were not the only ones who knew that the rebellion would profit a lot from being able to fly.

“Tempting,” he said none the less. “But I was thinking more of letting them use what's already there.”

He had studied the intelligence gathered on that camp intently in the past months. He knew everything there was to find out from a distance about the internal structure, the tasks the inmates were forced to perform, and the processing stations for various materials, from broken electronics to corpses. “Look here,” he now said, pulling a photograph from the pile and tapping his finger against the top left corner. “The bots are taking everything even remotely usable from the area and have their prisoners sort through it. That includes batteries, chemicals from washing detergent and stuff, and other shit that's generally flammable.”

“So you're gonna have them build pipe bomb from stuff found on supermarket shelves?”

“Why not? They may not be as effective but they're effective enough.”

“And you would know.” Miller sounded less than convinced.

“I would,” John told him. “I didn't always have a fully armed army at my disposal. Growing up, pipe bombs made from shelf products were the only thing we had besides guns. In fact, making bombs like that was one of the first things my mother taught me.”

Miller didn't seem surprised at the revelation. It was well-known that John Connor had had an interesting childhood. “Once again it turns out that Sarah Connor did a good job raising her kid,” the old man said, but John couldn't tell if there was sarcasm in it or not. “So what now, we're going to have those people fight killer bots with things you played with in the sand box?”

“Exactly. We don't want them to blow up the entire camp, after all. That is something we are very specifically trying to avoid. It'll be enough to give them a chance to defend themselves against the guards and the turrets. Everything coming from the outside, we'll take care of.”

“Hm,” Miller grunted. Then he grinned. “I like it. Gotta have to appreciate the irony if it works.”

If it worked, there would be more irony in it than he could ever fathom. John just nodded. “We better start working on the details,” he decided, finally sitting down on a chair; he wouldn't be leaving this room anytime soon. “Things aren't going to get any better the longer we wait. I want to get this over with before the end of the year.”

  


-

  


Laina's breasts ached. It was such a stupid thing to notice, but they did. She was thirteen now, slowly growing into a woman, and her breasts were growing, too, and they _hurt_. It wasn't even that bad. Nothing compared to the ache in her joints and muscles from the hard work, in the stumps of her two lost fingers from the cold, or the headache that only seemed to lessen sometimes, never going away completely. But it was one more thing that she had to deal with and some mornings, when she stood upright and felt the familiar pain in these two things that would do nothing but get in the way and make her clothes fit even worse, it seemed like it was one thing too many.

They were still small and she hoped they wouldn't get very big. Probably wouldn't. Her mom, when she had still been alive, had once told her she'd probably never have a big bust because there wasn't enough food around. Laina hadn't seen the connection, then. She'd been seven or eight and had had ideas about being a woman that included looking like one by having breasts notably bigger than a man's and fighting Aunt Cecilia for the two remaining bras they had. Back then, the idea of staying flat all her life had upset her. Now she hoped Mom had been right and that they wouldn't get any bigger than this. Still pretty flat. They had no business hurting this much.

At least she didn't have to do work today that was overly hard and exhausting. A new pile of garbage had arrived in two transporters the day before, and almost everyone was busy sorting through it and dividing it into smaller piles of roughly corresponding pieces. Laina had no idea where all this stuff came from. There were a great many things she had never seen, many bottles, cans, and cases labeled with words that made no sense to her. She could read, but not very well, and these were often words she was fairly certain weren't English. They weren't Spanish, either, and those were the only languages she knew. For a long time she had thought those were the only languages that existed, and she'd always wondered why people even needed two.

Not many corpses lately. It meant not many people were on corpse-duty. Laina didn't have to deal with anything dead for a week – a new record for her. She knew that Kyle had had to look for frozen bodies again two days ago, now that the snow was finally going away just a little bit, but today he seemed to have scored a job transporting broken furniture from the pile to the steel container at the other end of the camp. From her elevated position on top of the pile Laina could see him, walking a little awkwardly in too-big shoes and working with grim focus.

He wasn't a girl and therefore had no problem with growing breasts. Lucky kid. Laina sort of resented him for it, but by now resenting Kyle for anything and everything within his very small area of influence and without it had become like a game and there was no heat behind it. It was more like background noise. Involuntarily, Laina's undamaged hand went up to the cap on her head, that sat on top of another, smaller cap and had been given to her by Kyle earlier this year when he could have kept it for himself. She scowled, because resenting him was one of the few comforting constants in her life and sometimes he made that really hard. But that was something she could resent him for, too, and she did. Gleefully.

Noise from the sky distracted her just when she was trying to pull a twisted metal construction out of the pile of garbage without falling down backwards when it came loose. A machine approached the camp from the direction of the ruins of skyscrapers that were just barely visible in the dusty air. Her stomach clenched at the sight, and she couldn't keep herself from staring at the machine again and again as it landed and docked, needing to see what was inside.

Usually, only transporters on wheels came here. The only flying machines they ever saw passed far above their heads, sometimes even above the clouds so they only head the noise. But lately, the bots had started to collect stuff and people with the flying things – probably to sweep a larger area, she had heard someone speculate. That person had gone on to talk about how good that was; it meant they wouldn't run out of work and get all killed for it. Another had argued that there was nothing good about not being dead here and at least if the machines gave up their camp it would be over. Laina didn't care about either of those arguments. She just knew that new people for the work force meant more people got sorted out, and that she was missing two fingers and had started bleeding a few weeks ago and the cramps that went along with it had made it hard for her to move.

It was another problem Kyle didn't have. Aside from the pain, there was the blood that made everything really uncomfortable. Laina had helped herself by stuffing paper into her pants, which wasn't much more comfortable, but it kept her pants from getting soiled too much. They didn't get new ones very often, and certainly not every month. Sometimes there were hygiene products for women from the old world in the piles delivered by the transporters and who could get away with it stuffed them into their coats to use themselves or use for trading. Laina had only ever taken a box like that once, years ago, and had traded it for an extra pair of socks. Back then she couldn't imagine how anyone would give up something precious like warm socks for something like that. Now she regretted not keeping some for herself.

And there was the other thing to think about, including the one thing that wouldn't let her rest ever since she'd started bleeding. That she could get pregnant now, and then she would surely die. Even if there were no more new prisoners coming in ever, even if there would never be another health check. It was not something that could go unnoticed for long. She would have to protect herself or she would die. And there was no protection beside hiding, and no hiding place was truly safe. Not if she actually needed to sleep at some point. (She'd tried to say awake and aware when it first started and nearly passed out the next day at work.) If one of the Men came for her now she had to fight, but that would only make her end up like Alex. If she didn't, she would end up like Aunt Cecilia. There was only death waiting in her future.

So many girls didn't make it through this phase of growing up. Laina was determined to be one of those who did. She had a sharpened piece of metal under her coat – if the machines found it on her she would be killed, too, but she wouldn't give up without a fight. And yet the fear was getting stronger and stronger with every beat of her heart, and sometimes it was so tempting to just give up rather than stand it another day.

And now this new transporter that could mean an early death for her. Laina watched from her place on the pile and saw that there were people inside, just as she had feared. Many people. A lot of them wouldn't make it through the sorting progress, but with this camp so diminished by the endless winter, more than usual would. Still not enough to fill in all the empty spaces, but it would make Laina a little more expendable. These people, thin, dirty and terrified as they were, could kill her.

Or be her salvation. There were kids in there, girls and boys, who were younger than her, and didn't know the rules of this place yet. They were easier targets. If she could just stay out of sight at the right moments, the Men would never have a reason to look for her because there were more than enough potential victims around to keep them happy.

Laina had never considered herself a particularly decent person. She was a survivor, and in the world she lived in she could only be one or the other. She still had enough decency left to hate herself a little.

It was generally easier to hate Kyle instead. Or that girl over there, in the line of new arrivals: Laina's age but clinging to the arm of a man almost twice her size and almost certainly her father. He would protect her if they both made it through the sorting. She would be safe, and Laina hated her.

Some days, she hated almost everyone.

She still went looking for Kyle at the end of the day. When she saw him disappear underground, she called his name, quietly, and gestured for him to come over to her. He did, not even looking surprised anymore. Once they reached the hiding place Laina had been using for the last two nights (this would be the last one, wasn't safe anywhere for longer than three nights in a row), he crawled in with her and they leaned against one another, sharing what warmth they had. During the day they were both on their own, but in the long, hard winter that had been the years since Alex had died, sticking together at night had saved them from freezing more than once. Alex would have been proud, Laina thought, for once without bitterness. He had wanted them to help each other survive.

(She wasn't doing it for Alex. She was doing it for herself and maybe a little bit for Kyle, too, but it felt good to imagine that she was honoring his wishes, and a nice excuse.)

The entire night, Laina was well aware of the hatch not far from their position, that would allow anyone who knew where it was access to their sleeping spot. Kyle curled up and fell asleep within minutes, as if he actually felt safe beside Laina, and she hated him a little more. But he was trembling with cold all night and kept twitching, his sleep disturbed either by nightmares or noises in their vicinity, and eventually he sat up and turned to look at Laina as if surprised that there was no rest for her at all. She could see the white of his eyes in the nearly-complete darkness.

“What's wrong?” he whispered, barely audible.

Laina considered not saying anything at all. Just lie down and pretend to sleep. But her mouth wormed words without her consent. “Do you still think Connor's army is coming for us?” it asked.

Kyle nodded wordlessly. Laina wanted to ask how he could be so sure, but the answer was obvious: There was no reason to hang on if it didn't. “I hope they come soon, or I'm not gonna make it,” she said instead.

He sat very still. “Why not?” he eventually asked. “You survived for this long.”

For some reason Laina had to think of that girl she'd seen in the line of new arrivals earlier today, who hadn't made it after all because there had been something wrong with her and she had been sorted out, and a part of her wanted to scream. It wasn't fair that that girl was to have a chance when Laina didn't, but it was even more unfair that she wouldn't after all. She could have made it, if she'd been remotely clever. But the machines wouldn't give a chance to _anyone_.

And how could she possibly explain to this boy what had changed, what was going on with her body when she barely understood it herself? “It's not getting easier,” was all she offered. “Go back to sleep.”

She didn't really want him to go back to sleep. She wanted him to keep asking so she could make him understand how lucky he was for not being a girl, and how much she held that against him. But he did, without any other word, and Laina was left alone in the dark.

  


-

  


The night was short, after all. It ended long before dawn with the sound of the hatch nearby being quietly opened. Laina moved to wake Kyle but he was already alert, having grown up in an environment that didn't forgive deep sleep. They didn't hesitate, didn't wait to see if it was just another kid making it down here very late. Soundlessly, they slipped out of their little metal cave and down the other side of the tunnel, towards the Box.

Laina's thoughts were racing. They were in an area with wide tunnels, because all the tighter ones had been blacked by snow in the winter and those that weren't now were still coated with ice. Anyone could follow them here, but if they made it to the icy ones, they might be able to slip inside. And freeze to death, if they didn't get a chance to get out in time, but right now that was a risk she was willing to take.

Or she could just trip Kyle and leave him behind to be found while she got away. It would be okay, he was a boy, it wouldn't be so bad while it could kill _her_...

Alex had wanted them to help each other out, after all, Laina thought, but her face was frozen with fear and couldn't sneer.

In the dark she reached behind her until her hand closed around the fabric of Kyle's coat and she didn't let go as she led the way through the tunnels.

Behind them, there was the muffled curse of a grown up, then silence. But some of the men were good at moving soundlessly over the metal floor down here and Laina only realized that they were being followed and how close their pursuer had come to them when the man stumbled and fell heavily against a wall. The entire tunnel seemed to shake with it. Laina couldn't breathe.

They were moving soundlessly, too. The man couldn't hear them, and yet he knew were they were going because there was only one obvious path to take. At the first intersection, Laina hesitated, torn by crippling indecision. One way led to an exit and on the surface, perhaps, to a chance to escape. But the exit could be blocked. If she had been that man, she would have blocked it. And then they would be trapped.

The other way led to the pipes that were frozen, and there they would lose the guy for sure, but she didn't know if any of them was accessible at all by now. Either way could led to safety and either way could kill her.

But she had to make a decision _now_ , or it wouldn't matter what would have happened in the direction she hadn't taken if the man caught up with her. Before she could move, though, Kyle moved past her. Laina was still gripping his sleeve, so she followed down the path towards the pipes. It was more winded. No good hiding place, but they might buy some time. Still, if the pipes were frozen shut, it would still be a death trap. She should have checked if they were open before settilng in this area for the night. Stupid. Stupid.

This place didn't forgive mistakes.

But Kyle stopped before they even reached the pipes. He knelt down and started to fumble against the wall. Laina could barely make out his movements in the dark. She wanted to hurry on, feeling that their pursuer came closer and closer, but she waited until the kid pulled away a panel she hadn't known was there, let alone loose. An opening of pure blackness opened up behind it and without hesitation she crawled inside when Kyle urged her to without making so much as a sound. It was tight inside – a tunnel she didn't know the end of, and because it was dry there was no ice. There was probably danger at the other end, or Kyle would stay here all the time, but at the moment she didn't care. The darkness was like a cloak around her and as soon as they were deep enough inside, they would be safe even if the man saw them go in here. It was too small an opening for anyone to follow them.

Behind her there was a bit of noise when Kyle climbed in after her. There was no sound of him re-attaching the panel, and for all Laina could tell without being able to see anything, he had followed her head first, so he had never had the intention to hide this tunnel again, unless he had somehow learned how to pull up that panel with his feet. There was no room to turn. She did anyway, looking back as best she could. Her eyes, adjusted to the darkness, made out Kyle's silhouette right behind her, and then it was gone when something blocked even the miniscule shimmer of lighting falling in through the opening.

He hadn't tried to hide them because it was too late and all they could do was try to get deep enough inside as to be unreachable. Which Kyle was not. Bending in any direction was nearly impossible, but Laina reached behind her anyway and closed her crippled hand, for a second, around Kyle's thin wrist before it was pulled out of her grasp.

Kyle slid down the tunnel and out of sight without a sound. Laina bit back a sob and turned forward, crawling on until her forehead collided with a wall. Felling left and right, she found no openings, no way for her to go. But that couldn't be; every pipe, every tunnel went somewhere. Finally she turned her face up and found the opening she'd been looking for. The pipe went straight up and ended in a loose, ill-fitting plate not a meter above her. Even from down here she could see that the sheet of metal wasn't bolted down by the way the palest hint of light shone around too many edges.

She got onto her knees and pressed her hands against the plate. It moved with barely any resistance at all. Lifting it disturbed the snow that had covered it and send it falling into the tunnel, into Laina's face. Not a lot of it – the sheet had been thin and she lifted the cover just enough to see where the tunnel lead. White nothing stretched before her, until the fence. The gray sky and the gray ground let her see it all even at night. The containers with their beds were there when she turned, closer than she had thought. Closing the entrance again, Laina found that there was no way to secure it. This was the reason why Kyle didn't use this tunnel a lot. From this side it was too easy to get in, and not long enough to be safe from both ends at once.

But there was only one end for her to worry about now, only one guy looking for her, and he wasn't looking anymore. Laina crawled back into the center of the tunnel, where her gloved hands touched something soft. Confused, she froze for a moment until she realized it was Kyle's blanket that he had dropped and left behind here, lest he lose it for good. Now Laina pulled it closer, lay on it so it protected her from the icy metal, and buried her face in her hands, wishing for the night to end.

If only Connor would come now. If one he came _right now_ and saved Kyle and her, and maybe Doc Benjamin, the old medic who had taken off her frozen fingers and not asked for anything in return. If only he and his army would save them and then mow down all the others and burned their bones. Laina imagined this whole camp on fire. How warm it would be.

Sleep came and went in little pieces forced on her by exhaustion and driven away by fear and misery. When morning came, she and her body couldn't remember if there had been any sleep at all. She climbed out through the opening underground, not wanting to give away the location of the one overground though many had to know about it anyway. She handed in her blanket and Kyle's, saw Kyle a good bit further down the food line, hunched into his coat after a cold, cold night. Laina thought about fire again. This food would have to go first. It kept them alive, it was all they had, but she hated it so much. Maybe flames would turn it into something good.

The man who had been delivered to the camp with his daughter the day before had hanged himself in the night, using a stripe of his blanket and the frame of his bed. Laina and another man were ordered to take him down and put him to the others. She thought about stealing his shoes for Kyle, who was wearing the camp-issued ones today, doubtlessly having lost his oversized good ones to last night's attack. But the opportunity never came and Laina tried very hard not to think of Kyle much. Or of anything. There was a change in the work shift and that confused and distracted her for a moment. The new arrivals who still lived weren't send to work with the rest of them but ordered to stay behind and “conserve their energy”. It was odd. Then their regular work began, and it was just corpses today. It seemed the entire world was made of dead bodies and severed limbs. No one escaped processing them, and that was something else that kept Laina's mind off other things. (Mostly she spend the day imagining everyone else joining the legion of the dead but her, Kyle, and one or two others.) In the evening, they were joined by the new ones and then they stopped working for the night and the new ones didn't.

Great lamps brightened the areal. From the distance it looked like a picture that hurt the eyes.

Laina didn't know what was going on. There was more work with the corpses now; they no longer were just undressed and thrown away. She got that, but she didn't know why. And she didn't care. All the cared about was that it was night again and they still hadn't been rescued.

This time, she stayed away from Kyle, preferring to sit in the cold darkness by herself.


	14. 2018 - 3/3

Things, for once, were going well. Better than expected. John had foreseen all sorts of obstacles on their way to the L.A. mission, but while there had been plenty, they had overcome them with ease. Especially the steady supply of fuel they now had at their disposal made a difference; not just for them but for Bob Brewster's army in the north as well. John's units were freer to roam the area and enter the city knowing they could quickly escape from it once things got too hot. There were small bases and bunkers all over, offering shelter for the soldiers stationed in and around the city. John had been to many of them himself. They weren't comfortable, but they did the job.

They had expected civilians to fill in the empty spaces there and then hopefully join the army, but so far hardly anyone had been encountered inside and close to Los Angeles. The machines had done a good job clearing the territory. Who hadn't been found yet stayed in hiding, often not ever daring to come out when they ran out of food. Brigadier Perry's division had found an underground hall containing four families, all dead. Most had been shot in the head, the adults obviously choosing suicide over starvation or the machines.

There weren't an awful lot of people left to safe in the city, except those in the camp. John and his army had taken too long to get here, and while intellectually he knew that there had been no way for them to come any sooner without sacrificing an awful lot of other people, he still felt guilt lie in his stomach like a stone whenever he thought about it, where it kept company with the promise he had once made his mother. He never dwelt on either matter long, as there was no point to it. What mattered now was that they were here and that they were almost ready to strike.

In the past months they had destroyed most of the factories in and around Los Angeles. They had stationed forces all over the city and had even found an albeit unreliable way to disturb the machines' communication so that perhaps the ones at the camp wouldn't be able to call for reinforcements when things went down. Everything was almost in place. Within the week, John wanted to have the soldiers chosen for the infiltration of the camp prepared and ready, so that they could execute their mission before the month was over.

The month was November. John had wanted to do this before the turn of the year and for once it looked like he actually would.

All of the men and women who would allow themselves to be captured were volunteers. There were twelve of them altogether; all of them had been certified by Kate to be in good health and they all knew what they were getting into. The risk was higher this time – they would be in the camp longer, the machines would know they were there, and if they were identified they would probably be tortured for information. John hoped it wouldn't come to that. They all did. Still, there was one sacrifice that had to be made.

Someone actually had to tell the machines about the information possibly within their grasp. And it had to look real.

That person would be the last to be caught. The others would go alone or in small groups so as not to attract attention. It would be weeks before everyone was in. After Skynet learned about them – about one of them, in fact, as John had no intention to give away just how many there were – it would only be days before the attack. But those days could be very long.

He hoped he had chosen the infiltrators wisely. People who were scared made mistakes, and those going in would have reason to be terrified. Not to mention the one who would turn traitor on them. He had been chosen, too – another volunteer. The one with the most reason for fear and the most important role to play. John was asking a lot of the men who followed him.

He would have gone himself, but by now Skynet probably knew what he looked like. This time, he had to stay behind the scenes until the last possible moment. He hated that, but it was nothing he could change.

At least it would be over soon. John tried to tell himself that if his father was indeed in this camp, there was no way the raid could go wrong. But the thought held no comfort. He didn't know for sure Reese was in there, And he didn't know for sure that time couldn't change. Skynet seemed to think so, having based the plan that got him here on this presumption, and wasn't it the most intelligent mind on the planet? Nothing was certain.

Which meant that failure wasn't an option. John had spend the past months working on this. Coordinating attacks on outposts and factories in L.A., even leading some of them himself, and spending the rest of the time conferring and planning. Although he was in the same bunker as his family most of the time he had barely seen them at all. Meanwhile, Hernandez and his wife had adopted one of the war's countless orphans.

The girl, who had never known her real parents, was being showered with love by Ana Hernandez in place of her lost children, and while John didn't think that was particularly healthy, he didn't want this one kid who had found a loving home to lose it again. Nor did he feel that he was in any position to give family-related advice, considering his own complete and total failure to be there for his. It would all get better once this mission was over, he kept telling himself and them, but that didn't change the fact that somehow, Hernandez managed to be the invaluable help he'd always been in the preparation of their attack and still spend some quality time with his wife and new daughter in between.

The girl, whose name was Christina, was about Louisa's age and often played with her and Jeannie. It was through Hernandez's stories that John got updated on his own children most of the time. Whenever he had a moment to get some rest and actually made it to their room instead of just grabbing some shut-eye on the cot in the corner of the command center, no one was there, usually. And if they were, they were asleep as well. Kate had once, in a rare moment when they were both present and alert, told him that growing up, her father had rarely been there either, and yet she still loved him. John suspected that there was comfort in that, but he still wondered.

He would have a lot of catching up to do when the war was over. Jeannie would be twenty by then, Lou sixteen. He hoped it wouldn't be too late.

And that they were still around at that point.

Right now, Jeannie would be in school and Lou would be... John didn't actually have any idea where she would be. Possibly in school, too. She was five, and she loved learning almost as much as she loved pestering her big sister. Alternately she was hanging out in medical with her mother, or playing with Christina under the watchful eye of Chrissy's mother. Then John looked at the clock again and realized that it wasn't nine in the morning but nine at night. His sense of time had gone again, as it always did when he allowed himself to take a nap.

He sighed and rubbed his eyes. The nap in question hadn't been particularly long.

Not much longer now, he told himself. In two days he would lead another attack on a nothing in particular. He would take his division out into the city and fight and destroy every machine the came across. Others had been doing that for a while. L.A. was far from empty of bots, but by now, their numbers were down to a manageable amount. Which meant they _had_ to strike now. If they waited any longer, Skynet would either make sure the gabs in the lines were filled with twice the former number, or grasp what was going on and close the camp. In fact, they were already walking a thin line, where every action could be one too many.

Just as any action not taken could determine their failure in the end. Things had never been easy.

John yawned and reached for the coffee, not caring that it had gone cold hours ago. He didn't drink it for the taste.

Then his attention was on the file in front of him again. He had lost two soldiers from his personal unit during the last trip. Both were still alive but one would be out of commission for a long time, one permanently. He didn't really have the men to spare to take someone from another division to fill the gabs. And while there were new recruits, this was going to be both too dangerous and too important to take someone without combat experience. Rubbing his neck in an attempt to ease his persistent headache, he wondered if he could simple leave those positions open, make up for it with the people he still had. No, he thought. He needed at least one more. A sharpshooter would be perfect.

Perry would fight to keep his, no doubt, and Catpain Mildred Rias was more useful where she was anyway. John kept going over his options, cursing the fact that while he was a pretty good shot, he was nowhere near as good a marksman with a sniper rifle as he had to be for the way he'd planned the next mission. Major Koslowski's unit was too far away to borrow one of their two sharpshooters. Erics didn't need hers for the task they were on right now, but the girl she had taken on as a replacement for her lost sniper was still in training. She was showing great potential for all John heard, but she wasn't quite good enough yet.

Postponing the issue for the moment until he could discuss it with someone else, he decided to go check over their equipment to save time later. The way to the chamber where they kept their stock of weapons, comm units, first aid packs, flashlights, and other relevant things not currently in use, neatly divided by the units stationed here, wasn't far away. This base was big, but it was very straight forward. No winded corridors with too many side arms, no dead ends or breaks through walls to other complexes that hadn't originally been part of it. Just long hallways with doors left and right, wide enough to move their stuff through them without trouble. John reached a T-junction, turned left, and was at his destination within two minutes.

A guard was always stationed in the camber, and since earlier this year, the guard was being accompanied by a young dog. Between the two of them they were to protect the equipment and weapons from anyone unauthorized to get them. The dog, called Wuffles by Jameson the guard, looked curiously at John when he entered but didn't otherwise react. He knew him, after all. Strangers made him unfriendly, as they were supposed to, and only a command from a familiar figure would make him calm down.

John was just in the progress of checking over his own personal weapons arsenal when he heard voices down the corridor and looked up, frowning. The door was supposed to be closed at all times but now it was open and Jameson was standing in it, looking down the hall.

“New arrivals, Sir,” the Corporal told John when he stepped up to him, his semi-automatic still hanging by its strap over his shoulder. “Sergeant Raine announced them earlier. They are getting the tour.”

“I see,” John said, unhappy that he hadn't been informed about this but accepting that in times like this people wouldn't bother him with something so comparatively irrelevant. He'd still would have liked to know, just so he could avoid running into them. New recruits tended to either be somewhat starstruck in his presence or they were making a point of showing how unimpressed they were, and he didn't feel like dealing with either today.

He was wearing a cap and hadn't saved in a few days, but Raine would recognize him anyway, of course. John wondered if he could still get away without it looking like he was running from them. Then Wuffles growled and he was distracted for a moment.

Of course the dog would growl. There were four people he didn't know walking towards him. It was his job to growl. Then he barked. Jameson told him to shut up and Wuffles didn't.

The approaching group slowed down, obviously not trusting this barking thing even though it was on a chain. There were three men and one woman, all dirty and unkempt, all grown ups as John registered with some relief. Two of them were carrying guns and all of them gave the impression of having seen combat more than once. Even better. One obviously had never seen a dog, looking at Wuffles with open fascination – from a safe distance. Two looked apprehensive, the last one didn't have any expression at all.

Sergeant Raine mostly looked annoyed. “Seriously, Steve?” he asked the Corporal. “Shut him up.”

“Trying,” Jameson snapped back. “He's not usually this aggressive. Must be your ugly face.”

Despite his attempts to quieten the dog, Wuffles barks turned hysterical and he jumped towards the new recruits, almost reaching them before the chain stopped them. Three of them instinctively jumped back, only the man with the empty face remained unfazed. John stared at him stare at the dog. He was tall, broad-shouldered, his face dirty with dust and ash. But underneath the dirt his skin seemed strangle unblemished, almost too smooth for even a new born baby. Like plastic. Or rubber...

John's hand tightened around his weapon. “Terminator!” he yelled, the moment the man lifted his gun and shot Wuffles in the head, too quickly for anyone to react. Then he turned towards John, either having identified him as a primary target or as the biggest threat. He was hit in the chest by a salve from John's automatic and fell backwards, right in the middle of the shocked and confused new recruits and the soldier who had led them here.

“Get away from him,” John barked as Raine bent over the man he had to believe was dead. “Get me an explosive,” he snapped at Jameson, who stood frozen for just a second before disappearing into the camber behind him. Was this the only one, John wondered. Where there more? How many? _Where?_

He had to get all these people out of the way so he could blow the damn machine to bits. The moment Jameson handed him the grenade he had asked for the terminator's arm lifted and he shot Raine's face off.

After that, all Hell broke loose.

  


-

  


Four minutes after encountering the first terminator of his life, John Connor was running through the corridors of his underground base in San Diego, barking orders into his headset. He made it to a junction, and was just about to turn left when an explosion knocked him backwards. Excited voices filled his headphone, interrupted by the calmer ones of commanding officers trying to get some order reestablished. The base was under attack from the inside, by machines that looked like them, and everyone seemed to think that panic would be a pretty good idea right now.

Panic was never a good idea. Hurrying the fuck up, however, was.

John climbed back to his feet, ignoring the ache that ran through his entire body. He turned right, the other way being blocked to him now. Some of the voices filling the line had fallen silent, others were even more hysterical than before. This just wouldn't do. It wasn't supposed to happen. These were all battle-hardened soldiers who had seen plenty of action in the field without batting an eye. But this was an attack inside their home, the one place that was considered safe, and that wasn't supposed to happen either.

“Calm down,” John said, sternly and just loud enough to be heard over the noise. “Pull yourselves together. We have a protocol for this, so take a deep breath and remember what that is!” The main exit was supposed to be guarded by a dog, he thought as he ran down another corridor, towards the kitchen and the wash rooms. Whoever had failed to make sure the dog was there or had let the new arrivals in through one of the back doors had cost them the base and countless lives. “Did someone think to get Miller from communications?” John had tried to get there, not just for the old man, but fire had blocked his way and the explosion had blocked the detour. Even now he felt like he was riding down the hallway on a wave of heat.

“Private Hills here,” a voice he wasn't familiar with came from the earphone. “Communications is on fire, Sir. It's gone.”

John cursed under his breath where no one could hear it. “Understood, Private. Where are you?”

“We're on our way to the great hall. It's all panic there and the way to the exit seems to be blocked from what I hear.”

Whoever this private was, he was clearly in charge of his group. Good. He seemed tense but controlled. “If the exit is blocked, don't remove the blockade.” Where was John's family? He hadn't heard from Kate yet. “This is for everyone: Get the civilians and yourselves out through the passages in the back. Chances are the machines are ready to strike at the main entrance. And spread out. Get to the auxiliary bunkers. Don't have everyone stand around in one spot like sitting ducks.” The infiltrators had probably passed their position on the Skynet. Maybe the scrambling signal had prevented communication, but John wasn't going to rely on that.

There was still chaos, but it was a little less now. John took a turn and another one and found himself in front of the room he shared with his family. The door was open, the room empty. The fire was not yet anywhere near here but it would be, soon. He had no illusions about their ability to get it under control with so many parts of the base burning at the same time and so many paths blocked. This place was lost.

The cabinet that housed the confidential papers was open and empty. Beside him only Kate and Hernandez were able to open it so either of them must have taken everything, including the flat metal box in which John kept the photos of his parents. So there had been time for that. Good. It meant that Kate and the girls were probably safe, it had to.

“Has anyone seen Doctor Brewster?” he asked into the comm. There were several voices answering at once. Undisciplined. He heard an affirmative, so that was good, but he couldn't make out where the person had seen Kate, or if the girls had been with her. Then a new voice joined the chaos, and that voice was Kate herself, saying, “I'm stuck near the exit with Lou.”

So she had a comm unit. If she had only just gotten it or had had it the entire time and for some goddamn reason decided not to talk and tell John she was fine before he ran all the way here was anyone's guess. Then she added, “Jeanette is at Hernandez's place with Chrissy. I can't get to them,” in the calm, detached voice he'd only ever herd her use in her clinic, and John forgot that question for the moment.

The room Hernandez shared with his wife and daughter wasn't far down the hall, just after the next junction. John could see the reflection of flames on the metal of the walls from that direction and his heart did something twisted and painful that he had hoped it would never have to do.

He was the only one anywhere around here. If Kate had been the one taking the stuff from their room, why hadn't she gone for the girls first? If Hernandez had been the one, why hadn't he? Maybe they hadn't known the girls were there – it was the only possible explanation. But someone obviously had known, and that someone wasn't here either.

It didn't pay to base judgment on speculation before having any substantial information, he thought distantly as he ran towards the flames. As a leader he couldn't allow himself to. But when his daughter was possible dead, it was hard to remember that.

He made it around the corner and a wave of heat hit him in the face like a physical blow. There was smoke, but not a lot – a soft draft was blowing it in the other direction and that was good, that was perfect, because it allowed him to breathe and to make out the shape of his child, lying on the floor and struggling with the heavy door that had fallen across her legs. John was with her in seconds, bending down to lift off the door and the air was much more bearable down here. Jeannie looked unburned, just scared and angry. There was a bloody gash on her forehead, and her hair was singed at the edges. She was fine. He pulled her up into his arms and immediately she struggled against his grip.

“Let me go!” she wailed. John wasn't even sure she grasped who was holding her. “Chrissy is in there. We have to get her!”

“Inside the room?” John looked at where the room used to be. Something in there had exploded. There was no room anymore.

“No, over there! Down the corridor.”

Apparently the girls had been separated by the explosion, with Jeanette falling on this side and Christina either stuck on the other side of the fire or killed by it. John didn't need to look hard to know that it didn't matter. There was no way for them to get there. Either way, Hernandez's daughter was lost.

Did his curse extend to his friend, too? John's heart broke for that family, but there was nothing he could do. Jeanette continued to struggle against his hold and didn't listen to reason when he lifted her onto his shoulder and ran back the way he'd come as fast as he could before any more explosions could cut them off from the exit.

Jeanette was hysterical by now; not for fear but because they were leaving Chrissy behind. John got that he felt responsible for the younger girl and like this was somehow her fault. He understood, because he felt the same way about this entire disaster, but he was also capable of accepting the facts as they were.

“I got her,” he said into his comm, for Kate's benefit more than anything else. “Is anyone able to get into corridor 27 B from the west? There may be another civilian still trapped there.” He didn't say who, so Hernandez, should he be nearby, couldn't lose it and get himself killed in a rescue mission that had no point. He was far too emotionally involved to clearly assess the danger. The way John would probably have been had things been worse for Jeannie when he got there. Then he added “It's Christina,” anyway, because if his friend wanted to blindly throw himself into the fire in order to safe his daughter, who the fuck was John to stop him?

If his friend heard the message, he didn't comment on it. John focused on the way out, knowing that the main exit was unreachable from here. But that was not where they were going anywhere. His soldiers were keeping the civilians away from it right now, making sure everyone took the back doors, of which this base had many. When they had moved in here, John had considered them potential risks and had half of them blocked off, leaving only those that could be easily guarded. Now he hoped that he hadn't contributed to turning this place into a death trap.

The exit he was aiming for wasn't that far away. He had to take one detour to reach it, the direct route being blocked. The small door leading to the long, narrow tunnel that exited a good hundred meters from the base was open, one single soldier standing beside it and watching the corridor leading up to it. His face lit up when he spotted John.

“Almost everyone is out, Sir,” he reported. “But it's hard to tell how many are missing right now, and if they are dead or still trapped in there.”

John glanced down the corridor that lay empty and deceivingly quiet before them. He thought about handing Jeannie to the soldier and sending them out while he went back to look for survivors, but within a second of his contemplation progress, something exploded nearby and the entire bunker shook.

“If anyone's still in there, they're lost,” he declared. “Let's go.” They had to focus on the ones who they knew for sure were still alive, now. Anyone going in there was most likely not to come out. Still, it was hard for John to turn away. He was thinking about Chrissy, whom he had never even met. Her association with his friend was the only reason why she mattered to him in more than in the abstract sense, and he wondered how many other people he was turning his back on right now who would matter to him if only he let them.

Jeanette, who had fallen silent a while ago, let out one last scream of desperation when he carried her into the tunnel, but the soldier seemed happy enough to go.

They arrived under the gray night sky minutes later, John limping with no clear idea where all the aches in his body came from. People waited for them, in the shadows of derelict, half-collapsed warehouses. The base had once been a collection of basements for storehouses near the harbor. Someone had remodeled them long before they came here – before the war, even. John didn't know what this place had been used for, though some of the things they had found upon moving in had indicated that it was nothing good. It didn't matter now. This hadn't been a perfect place, being far too close to the surface for anyone's liking, but it had been spacious and after the San Diego-base they had originally planned to move into had been compromised, it had been a lucky find.

A lucky find that would have taken massive damage from an air strike. That no such strike had been made gave John hope that the terminators hadn't been able to pass on their position after all. None the less, the base was lost to them. They couldn't return, even after the fires went out. With luck, they would be able to salvage some of their equipment.

John couldn't think about the things they had just lost yet – he literally couldn't, though it was a big problem and he would rather think about this than about the people they had just lost. But right now he had to focus on the people still alive. There were not many waiting for them when he came out with his daughter still thrown over his shoulder. Most had taken to the surrounding buildings and the small bunkers nearby that had never been meant to house anyone for more than hours and wouldn't be able to do it now. They were a means to stay out of sight while John and the others organized the move to wherever the fuck they could go now.

Among the people around him, he recognized Kate with Lou in her arms, coming towards them and Hernandez, emerging from the shadow of a building with a face that was unreadable in the gray darkness of night and maybe carried no expression at all. There were some more lingering nearby, perhaps a dozen or so. Many of them wore field equipment on their backs or around their hips, marking them as military, but even those not carrying anything might be. Actually, as much as John worried about taking care of the civilians, there weren't many around. People who came to them from the outside usually did so with the explicit goal of joining the army, and those born into their community usually ended up joining the army, too, once they were old enough. The only ones not going out at least occasionally to blow up enemy bases or secure supply routes were those either very young, very old, or already crippled by this never ending war to the point where they could no longer fight.

And those too broken, like many of the people freed from the camps. They had been the only true civilians in the base, which now no longer offered any shelter to them or anyone else.

John set down his daughter, who immediately ran to her mother with a clear limp to her step. He was left standing there, thinking that she had to cut her hair now because the heat had curled and blackened the ends in places. Lou hugged her big sister who was crying hysterically into Kate's shirt now and all John could do, because that was what the situation called for, was turn to Hernandez and ask for a report.

Only seven people were reportedly dead, but another forty-eight were unaccounted for. They had lost a lot of their equipment, but had also been able to save a lot, as John had ordered Corporal Jameson and the remains of Raine's new arrivals to grab what they could hold and get it outside. No doubt that terminator had intended to blow up the ammunition Jameson and Wuffles had been guarding, causing even more damage in the long run.

There had been at least two more terminators in the base, all having arrived within the last five days. Reports differed on the number; some spoke of as many as seven, most of whom had been neutralized as soon as John's warning to look out for the new ones had reached everyone. John closed his eyes for a moment at that, well aware that with his hasty warning he had most likely signed the death warrant of some perfectly human recruits who had been happy to finally have made it to their base. He had known that might happen when he gave it.

In one case, at least, the dog had been present when the group containing the terminator had come in, but his barking had been ignored because there had been issues with that particular dog in the past. John knew that this whole disaster was on him. He had obviously failed to make his men see the threat presented by the humanoid machines, until it was far too late.

If he had told them that their intent to camouflage as people was a fact and not mere speculation, they would have been more valiant. But then he would also have had to tell them how he knew, and chances were that no one would have believed him. He would have lost their respect and that army would have lost their leader, and humanity would, quite possibly, have lost the war.

And even if that hadn't happened, it would still quickly have come out that John Connor knew the future because of some time travel to the past. Even if he didn't give names, for all he knew Reese was no idiot. He would figure it out. And who knew how that would influence his actions? Could he even fall in love with John's mother if he knew he had to?

The thought was followed by another: that their liberation of the camp that his father was probably in, which had been meant to go down within the month, was not going to happen anytime soon. This attack had thrown them back months, if not years. They would have to spend a lot of time licking their wounds before they could pick up where they left off.

(And even if Reese wasn't in that camp yet, if this plan had always been meant to be delayed and he only got the tattoo he showed Sarah because John had been too late _now_ , it still meant that he had just lost the last chance to keep his promise to his mother and change time at least that little bit.)

Now that the immediate danger was over, it dawned on him just how much this attack had cost them. How much others would have to suffer because of it. And all because he had failed to have the doors properly watched. He'd underestimated the machines, he realized. Deep down, he hadn't thought the infiltration units were ready yet, had thought that the rubber-skin models would be easy to spot, as Reese had told his mother. But Reese had known what to look out for, while these people still had to learn, and John had failed to take that into account.

At least, he thought bitterly, he was at the top of the food chain. No one would be able to hold him accountable for his mistakes.

Except perhaps Hernandez, who had now lost another child to the fact that John Connor couldn't live up to his reputation. Who was still talking in a numb monotone but who would be hit by reality soon enough.

“Where's Ana?” he asked when his old friend stopped talking. He had not seen the woman anywhere and hoped it was just because she had already left for one of the bunkers or was hiding in the adjoining buildings.

“Last thing I heard she was looking for Chrissy,” Hernandez told him. “I lost my comm. Didn't hear anything until I got out.”

John didn't know what to say to that. Their conversation was quiet, not meant for anyone else, but people were watching from all around them, assessing the hopelessness of their situation from the stance and reactions of their commanding officers, awaiting orders. John couldn't, like he wanted to, pull the other man into his arms and offer whatever small comfort he could give. (He wondered, irrationally but not for the first time, if his friend somehow, by proxy, had to suffer all the losses that John had so far been miraculously spared.)

Instead he turned around and took stock of the people around them. Activated his comm and asked about the status of the other survivors. Tried to decide which bunker to take these to, where to gather everyone and where to move next. They needed to secure their transportation if they wanted to have any hope of getting anywhere. They needed to warn the other bases and the units out in the field and the scavengers living in the ruins about the terminators and get everyone equipped with dogs.

They needed to fucking move, because black smoke began to rise from the exits of their escape-tunnels, giving their position away.

They weren't many and they were all in at least moderately good condition, so he decided to forgo the nearest bunker, which was already crowded, and aim for one a bit further away. He could carry Jeanette if he had to, and if she allowed him to. He was just about to make them move when a cloud of smoke erupted from the exit of another nearby tunnel and people called out when they saw something moving in it.

John's hands few to his weapon without thinking and out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kate lifting the handgun she kept locked away in her clinic for cases of emergency. But it was not another terminator coming out but a stumbling, misshapen thing that soon turned out to be a figure with a scarf wrapped around their head, wrecked by violent coughs and supported by a much smaller figure covered entirely by a coat thrown over their head and moving blindly. Hernandez was the first to run to them, closely followed by Kate. John stood back, watching with amazement as his friend pulled the scarf away from Ana's face to let her breathe and his wife checked Christina over for injuries; marveling on how this world seemed to have one or two miracles left to offer after all.

  


-

  


Before the night was over, they had gotten to a small, uncomfortable, and not very deep bunker that not only felt temporary but also dreadful, in the true sense of the word. Like death would come through the bare, cracked walls at any moment. They weren't the first to make it there, but they didn't have to share it with many. An hour later, communication had been established with most of the other bunkers and hideouts, scouts had been send to collect their well-hidden vehicles and bring them to other, equally well-hidden places, and stock had been taken. The last bit was discouraging, but not devastating. John would stay in this area with some others for a few more days, get into the old base once it was safe and see what they could salvage. Blow up the rest so the machines wouldn't get it.

Much to do and little time to do it. As always. They had no time to give in to shock after the events of this day. Just like John had no time to give in to the feelings of guilt and inadequacy the attack had left in its wake.

He was thirty-three years old, but at times like this he still wished his mother was here.

Kate came in just when he snorted softly to himself. “What's so funny?” she asked. “Please tell me. I could use a good joke right now.”

“Nothing funny, Sweetheart,” he replied, using the endearment that had once started as a mockery of the fact that the life they lived left no room for endearments. “I just thought about how I wish my mother weren't dead.”

Kate had a snort of her own to spare. “Everyone wishes their mothers weren't dead.”

“Except our kids.” John stood from where he had been sitting on a pile of blankets and pulled her close. Today had been bad but it could have been much worse. Kate sighed and melted into his arms for a moment. She smelled of sweat and smoke, much like everyone else. This whole bunker smelled like smoke, too, but John wasn't sure if it had done so before they'd come and carried the smell with them.

The place prepared for them was little more than a bare chamber at the end of a long, narrow tunnel, barely long enough for a grown man to stretch out. It didn't even have a door; a guard at the end of the tunnel provided the only security they got. John had come here to get some documents that he hoped had made it and had found them right beneath the locked metal box that contained his private photos. It shouldn't matter so much that they had been saved, he'd thought, sitting on the few blankets someone had prepared for them. Those pictures and documents were essentially useless. He'd still been ridiculously, unexpectedly relieved to see they still existed. He didn't even know why – he hadn't looked at them in years.

Right now they were another symbol of him being more lucky than he deserved to be.

“How's Ana?” he asked into his wife's hair.

“Not good. She inhaled a lot of smoke. Chrissy's better. The coat protected her from the worst. She's going to be fine.”

“Ana won't?”

“I don't know.” Kate signed again. “Probably not. But she's happy.”

“Of course.” And maybe the world had one more miracle left to spare for that family; it definitely owed them. As it did everyone else.

Kate shifted a little in his arms but didn't pull away. “I shot a man today,” she said.

John, surprised, tried not to stiffen. Thinking of the new recruits who had the misfortune to be mingled with terminators. Before he had to ask, Kate continued, “He was laid up in my clinic, hurt bad but he would have lived. But we couldn't get him out without killing him and the fire was spreading.”

“You spared him worse,” John confirmed what she already knew.

“He begged us to help him. He begged me not to do it.”

Her voice cracked a little at the end, barely perceptible. John didn't remind her that this was something that he himself had had to face countless times on the battlefield when thing went sideways. Instead, he held her closer, thinking of how she so often had to face similar decisions when injuries were bad and medications were short, and how he didn't always appreciate how hard this life was on people who were kind.

“You did the right thing,” he assured her, adding, “I know that doesn't make it easier.”

“It's not as hard as it used to be, though.” Kate didn't sound like she thought that was a good thing. “Please, please tell me this war isn't going to be much longer.”

There was nothing that John wanted more. “We're much closer to its end than we are to its beginning.” It was the best he could give her.

“But today threw us back a lot,” he added after a moment. “Taking that camp, and that part of L.A. would have been so important, and now it may be a year or two before we can even try.” He hesitated for only a second, then said, “And I think-”, and then he stopped himself. _'And I think the man who'll go back in time to protect my mother is in there. And he's eleven.'_ As much as he wanted to share that burden, he couldn't put that on her. Not now. Not ever. Kate would meet Reese one day, a fucking kid compared to them no matter how many more years would pass before the day. How would she feel if she knew that they would have to consciously get the boy killed in order for John to live?

And with John their children. And the world. She'd do it, no doubt. But she wouldn't feel any better for it.

“Are you holding up?” he asked her. He didn't do that often enough – because he didn't see her often enough, he tended to forget over more pressing matters, and because it didn't matter, as her reply proved with painful accuracy.

“Does it matter?” she asked back. “I have to.”

“Did Hank make it out?” John had not seen the older man anywhere. Up until now he had simply assumed at anyone he knew personally was still alive, unless someone told him otherwise.

“Yeah. He's currently trying to turn this into a place where we can survive for a few days. He's also keeping an eye on the girls and on Ana while I'm here to snuggle with my husband.” She laughed into John's jacket, short and bitter. “Sometimes I think him getting his foot shot off was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“If it's any consolation, it's probably the best thing to happen to him, too.” At least he wasn't dead yet. Today had shown that one could just as easily die at home, too, but chances were that Hank wouldn't even have made it to this day if he'd still been a soldier. Not that he had been a bad one – John hadn't known him well enough to judge that – but simply because a lot of people hadn't.

“It's not much of a consolation, but thanks for trying,” Kate said dryly. She pulled back, the moment clearly over. It hadn't lasted five minutes, but John appreciated it all the same.

Kate grabbed one of the blankets, apparently what she had come for, and left. John went to pick up the documents he had been looking for, his fingers lingering on his metal box for a moment before he moved it aside.

  


-

  


The winter, that had taken the briefest, weakest of respites earlier this year, had returned. It was not as bad as it had been, though. The storms weren't as bad, the cold not quite as unforgiving. It was as if it had used up all its strength during its two-year assault on the land and was now just lingering in peace, to bury the world under white snow and nothing. Not as many people died now. The machines had modified their containers, had added extra fire pots and half a wall for the side that used to be all open.

Kyle knew it was because they needed the people to stay alive a little longer. There was more work than ever. The disposal units ran day and night now, the prisoners working in shifts. Not many living people came in, so they had to take better care of the ones they had.

It meant that they probably wouldn't instantly shoot Kyle for this transgression if they caught him, he though as he held a shoe against his food to assess it's size. It was a bit longer than the camp-issue one he was wearing right now, just big enough for him to grow into and not need another pair too soon. Perfect. He quickly slid out of the shoes he was wearing and into the new ones. They were cold from having been stored in this open hall for so long, but once they'd warmed up they might just save him from loosing toes.

He shoved his old shoes into the waistband of his oversized pants and hid them underneath his oversized coat. Only then did he dare to look around. Being assigned to sort through clothes had been lucky, but he'd needed a while to find two shoes that formed a pair and even longer to find one that wasn't worn to nothing and also the right size. Now he had to catch up on his workload or the machines would make him work the night shift as well, and then the next normal one, of course, and somewhere in the middle of that he would probably die.

Which would go drastically against what he was trying to accomplish here.

He managed in the end, but it was a close thing. The light was fading when he stepped out under the open sky, his new boots leaving sharp imprints in the freshly fallen snow and no moisture seeping in through the seams. He pulled up the collar of his coat, even though there was no wind. It was one of those very still days on which they could hear the workers on the other side of the camp and the never ending whirr of the machines.

Right now, Kyle couldn't hear anything but snow and frozen mud crunching underneath the booths of a hundred workers going back to the containers. He lined in at the very end of the group due to having finished so late. It was a slow shuffle; no one hurried because that was a waste of energy. Kyle kept an eye open for potential threats and mapped out an escape route, just in case. He didn't see Laina anywhere. She had to be way ahead of him.

Or so he thought, until he heart a banging noise behind one of the sheds that lined the way, like wood falling against wood. On this quiet day the sound seemed exceedingly clear. If was followed by silence, then something that sounded like human voices being very low, almost muffled. Kyle looked around, but none of the others seemed to hear it. He didn't want to go look, afraid of what he might find and who might find him, but no one else did. So he carefully walked over to the shed, stepping only where the snow had already been trampled down and wouldn't make noise.

It was Laina back there, half-hidden behind a stack of wood and metal. A man Kyle didn't recognize for his hood had his hand wrapped around her throat to hold her down and to keep her quiet (because girls who had their mouth covered tended to bite), and with his other hand he tried to get her coat open. He was struggling with it, because she was struggling and trying to buck him off, but already her movements were getting weaker. Neither of them noticed Kyle as he started running towards them.

His shoe, the old one, hit the man in the head. He started and turned, and the other shoe hit him in the face. His hand slid from Laina's throat and she managed to throw him off balance. Before the man could regain his balance, Kyle slammed into him and together they slammed to the ground.

Kyle didn't waste time being down. He jumped upright at once, his knee colliding with something equally hard that prompted a curse. Laina was already on her feet and together they ran.

They didn't get far; not even a few steps. Kyle crashed hard to the frozen ground when something grabbed his ankle and for a second all he saw was Laina's back as she kept running, oblivious to having lost him, the image overlapping with something in his memory that he pushed away in favor of turning around and kicking his free foot violently into his attacker's face. The hold around his leg loosened and he was able to pull away and as he was scrambling to get to his feet strong hands grabbed him and pulled him upright.

The man stood also; he was clutching his nose, with blood running down his face, and he seemed very, very angry. Angry enough to leap at him blindly and tear him to pieces, Kyle thought distantly. Maybe because he knew that all this blood would convince the machines that he couldn't work anymore. He became aware that he might just have killed this guy.

But the guy didn't leap. He stopped – staring, full of rage, but he stopped. Beside Kyle stood Laina, pulling him close and behind her with one arm and wielding a blade in the other one. Kyle looked at it numbly. Having that could get _her_ killed. But she had it, and was waving it in the man's bleeding face right now, warning him to leave them the fuck alone.

And the man backed off. As soon as he had backed far enough, Laina grabbed Kyle's hand and started running in the opposite direction.

  


-

  


Things changed after that, although the change was subtle. It was still cold. Work was still hard. Kyle was still constantly wary, afraid, and hungry. But he and Laina stuck together more, never spending a night alone anymore. When someone came too close to them they still ran, but if they were cornered they turned to fight, and it made more than one man who could easily have taken either of them on their own back away.

Kyle had always suspected that everyone would be safer if they actually supported each other rather than all fending for themselves hoping it would hit someone else. Seeing that it worked was a great relief, but it also made him sad to think that maybe Alex would still be alive if they'd all been a little smarter back then. Laina seemed to think among similar lines, maybe thinking about her aunt, too. Her and Kyle still didn't talk much, but there was something lost and brooding about her quietness some nights, that at one point, maybe half a month after the incident that started their cooperation, actually prompted Kyle to ask her if she was alright.

“I think I am,” she said after a second of thought and even gave him a tentative smile. “I wasn't sure, but I guess I should be. Yes.” She nodded, as if to affirm her own words. “I'm gonna be okay.”

And that was the only time they ever talked about it. Laina seemed a little more relaxed after that, as if she had to say the words for them to be true. Kyle never knew what the problem had been in the first place but if she said it was going to be okay he was only too willing to believe it.

Willing, if not entirely able. Life had let him down too often; almost every time. He wanted it to be true, though, and if there was one thing Laina had never done to him it was telling a lie. (If, perhaps, only because that would have required talking to him.)

In the nights they shared their blankets, one of them always staying awake to keep watch while the other slept. They took turns. It robbed them of sleep but the sleep that they got was all the more restful for it. Kyle thought that like this, they could both make it. If they could get the other kids to join them in keeping watch and being watched over and joining forces they would make it even better, all of them – Kyle knew that, but recognized a lost cause when he saw it.

He hadn't even spoken to another kid, or even another person, beside Laina, in years.

Maybe, he thought, they could try to connect with the next kids who were delivered here, make it easier for them from the start. But the next delivery did not contain anyone younger than a teenager, and the one that made it through the selection was already hissing and snarling in all directions and got killed for trying to take someone's food the second morning. It made Kyle wonder about the world outside the fence again but he knew no one would give him any reliable information on that before he saw it for himself.

Some of the new ones were talking about it to the ones who had been here for years. Kyle overheard a few conversations but they didn't tell him all that much; they were meant for people with a common frame of reference that he, having next to no memories of his life before the camp, was lacking. He could have asked Laina, but that seemed too intimate somehow, too much like they were friends, and he didn't want to presume. What he gathered was that soldiers had been sighted in the city, near the camp, or so rumors would have the people believe. His heart beat faster when he heard that, and for a while he managed to push aside the doubt that came from the fact that none of these people had actually seem any themselves.

They couldn't have. From what Kyle gathered none of them actually came from the city. They had all been found and collected far from it, in deserted villages, on old farms – surviving far from everything by hoarding supplies they made during rare trips into the former population centers. Kyle didn't know exactly what a farm was; he got that it was a place not unlike this camp, but smaller and without the dead bodies. He also go that that kind of life was very hard, and the trips were very risky, but they had felt safe out there. Obviously, they hadn't been.

It was unusual for the machines to deliver new inmates this late in winter, lest so many of them. Kyle overheard someone talk about how they had been in the transporter for days; how others that had been with them had died of hunger and thirst and cold while they were in there. There were maybe three dozen that made it, and three days after they came, when everyone had made up their mind about living or dying, the machines sorted through their prisoners again.

That was a bit unusual, too, as the camp was still nowhere near full and machines were, therefore, primarily interested in keeping their workers alive rather than killing them. Kyle was confused when he stood in line before Laina that morning and saw the occasional person be shot on the spot before him – sometimes even people who didn't look very sick and who would have been able to work at least a few more days before falling over. Wasted potential, he thought. The machines didn't operate like that these days.

“What's wrong with them?” he asked Laina as they slowly walked towards the check point. “Are they sick? They look okay.”

Laina just shrugged. It was the man standing behind her in line who answered. Kyle didn't know this guy, but he had seen him around several times. “They are scanning for diseases that can spread,” he explained. “Heard the bots lost half a camp to that elsewhere from the new ones. Wasn't much of a risk here when they killed anyone who sneezed, but with tings like this they have to check for it now and then to make sure no one can infect all their precious workers. Are you feeling okay?”

Kyle didn't answer. Neither did Laina. They stood a little closer together, tense. The man looked at them through narrowed eyes and made a funny sound in the back of his throat. Then he took half a step back and Kyle relaxed a little bit, though Laina did not.

They were still almost clinging to each other when they reached the checkpoint. There were no dead bodies lying around; the first two workers to make it had been ordered to remove the ones who got shot so they wouldn't be in the way. The blood was still there, of course, having soaked into the snow that had fallen in the night and continued to fall even now. Stark red against white, that rare bit of color in this world. Kyle couldn't help staring at it.

He went first, his heart pounding as it always did. He didn't feel ill, but he didn't feel good either – he never did. There was always the chance that it was something worse than just hunger, cold, and lack of sleep, something the machines would find worthy of elimination. But he passed the invisible scan and stepped away.

Normally, here was no signal to indicate that he was okay, and he'd only be able to tell that he was going to live by the fact that the bots didn't shoot him. This time a monotonous, mechanical voice said “No infection detected”, officially declaring him cleared for existence. Laina stepped through the scan after him, tense and apprehensive like him. Their eyes met just the moment the machine monotonously repeated the words “No infection detected” and Kyle released breath he hadn't been aware he'd been holding.

Laina was about to step away from the scanner when the machine added, “Pregnancy detected” in the same mechanical voice and shot her in the head.


	15. 2020 - 1/3

The wind was blowing even stronger now. James Donal could hear it outside the transport and couldn't believe that the last days of his life would be so fucking miserable.

It hadn't been snowing when the collector caught him near Long Beach but it might as well have been for all the visibility he'd had in the gusts of wind. He'd thought he was going to freeze – only idiots ran around outside in weather like that, let alone in broad daylight, but his jeep was standing broken down three miles down the road far from any shelter, and visibility that was bad for him had to be bad for the machines, too, right? Sure, they had heat sensors and shit, but at that point he hadn't felt that there was any kind of heat left in his body.

Despite the low-grade but near-paralyzing fear in his guts, he had been almost glad when the collector broke through the wall of white in front of him and caught him in its net.

He was going to die soon. There was no doubt about that. Donal knew how those camps worked, what they wanted their workers to be, and he didn't fit the bill. He was old, and he wasn't healthy. A persistent cough had been plaguing him for years, and sometimes it made his throat hurt so bad that he couldn't eat of speak. No, he wouldn't satisfy the machines' requirements. But at least they had taken him out of this storm before the end.

That it kept the wind out what the only thing this transport had going for it. Donal sat on hard, cold metal, in nearly total darkness. He knew that there were others in here with him but couldn't see them. It couldn't be many. No one spoke, though at some point a voice, sounding very young, was heard crying softly until quietened by wordless murmuring from the same direction. Donal had lost two lovers and two children to the machines, but they'd all been soldiers who'd gone down fighting. None of them had had to die like this.

Occasionally someone who wasn't him coughed. Other than that it was mostly silent. He didn't know how much time they spend in the large wagon, but he slept twice – once because he was actually tired, and once to pass the time. There were two more stops when the collector grabbed someone else, but those were all single people who didn't talk. No one asked any questions. By now, everybody knew what this was about.

The other cougher fell silent at some point and didn't start again. Lucky bastard.

The “lucky bastard”, Donal discovered later, was a boy of about fifteen or sixteen. He saw him briefly when they reached their destination, lying dead near the exit where he had been moved by some of the others so they wouldn't have to sit on a corpse, and wondered if the kid had any family who was still waiting for him to come back from whatever he had been doing. Then he was outside and too busy being scared of dying to care.

It was another gray day in an endless sequence of gray days. He would have liked to see the sun one more time before the end.

They formed a line when a machine ordered them to. Donal had never heard them speak before, even though he had been dealing with them for so long. The didn't usually communicate with each other in a way humans could hear, and where he came from, they didn't communicate with humans at all, except in the universal language of bullets. The voice this one used was hardly that; it sounded like audible electrical impulses forming words. There was no inflection, nothing individual about it. Nothing human. Donal found he preferred them silent.

He wondered it they would tell him they were going to kill him before they did.

Just a hundred yards from him a large, square building loomed over the entire camp. Donal swallowed. He knew how the machines here preferred to kill their prisoners if they had enough of them, but today they did not. He would be spared that. He might still get locked in there to suffocate or starve in the darkness, and his horror grew.

Not much longer now. He wasn't going to die like that. He had to hold on just that little bit longer. He was going to die.

He had to keep it together, and he was going to. He wasn't going to be the one who fucked things up for everyone. He'd probably be dead within a year anyway, what did it matter?

He had lived an effective life – before the war it had even been a good one. He was old, he was tough and liked to think of himself as brave. He shouldn't be this fucking afraid.

Then the man before him was at the checkpoint. He was the third. Both women who came before had been branded with one of those terrible bar code tattoos and send down the ramp to the right, but this guy was limping and sickly looking and he was send to the left. Towards that box. So the darkness it would be. Donal fought panic. That guy over there who might be half his age wasn't fighting, though he had to know what this meant. He couldn't be that naive. He had to know and he was braver than Donal who even now fought the urge to bolt.

He could do this. He had to. Just keep the upper hand against the fear for another minute or so.

He was scanned.

He was send to the left.

He let the fear win.

“Stop!” he yelled. “Stop, don't kill me.” A machine grabbed his arm. The hand looked like a human hand, he though. Hoped they wouldn't just shoot him now, but no, the bot was dragging him towards the box. Snapped his arm as discouragement for anyone else who might want to resist. Donal yelled in pain, and then he yelled in fear and anger, “You can't kill me! I'm a soldier with the army, Connor send me. He send others. They are in here. Let me live. I'll tell you everything, I'll help you find them!”

The machine kept dragging him, It wasn't working! Why wasn't it working? “You're making a mistake!” Donal yelled, desperately. “They know all the codes and all the locations. They know where Connor is! So do I! I can help you!”

He looked around, twisted to see the machine at the checkpoint, his eyes glancing over the fence and the area behind it. The ruins of once towering buildings. Someone was there to watch the camp, unseen, undetected. They should be there. Had they been found? Had they given everything away before he could? Were they dead? If they were where they had to be, would they kill him even if the machines ignored his words? A bullet to the head would be better than that box. But no bullet would come for him if the machines didn't care. Donal fought harder, no room in his brain for the pain in his arm. “They are all around you already,” he tried again. Going down in history as the one who gave everyone up. “They are watching us!”

And finally, as if given some unheard signal, the machine dragging him was slowing down, then stopping. It turned to him but didn't say anything. Eventually Donal realized that it couldn't speak.

The other bot, the one from the checkpoint, rolled over to them, leaving behind the other prisoners, who stared at them, blankly, or angrily, or hateful. Wishing Donal was dead, wanting him to die before he could give away the hope they suddenly thought they had. “Explain,” the machine ordered, and Donal was overcome with a wave of relief and exhilaration so intense it momentarily even overlay his fear of dying.

He opened his mouth to answer. Then he died.

  


-

  


Sergeant Hasting dropped down the moment she fired the shot and saw the blood and brain matter explode out of Captain Donal's head. The old soldier had fulfilled his last mission. Now she had to make sure this one didn't become hers.

Later, when she was out of here, she could worry and feel bad about the fact that she had just killed a comrade and good man. It hadn't been a task people had been lining up for, and one she had been blessed with by being a very, very good shot.

Right now, her first priority was survival. She'd known going in that there was a high chance she wouldn't make it, but if John Connor came to you and asked you to risk your life for the sake of hundreds of innocent suffering people, it was damn hard to say no.

But Hasting had risked her life on every mission she'd been on for Connor. This time the scales were just a little more tipped in favor of the enemy. It was the part that involved blowing the Captain's brains out that had bothered her most. Now that that part was over, the survival thing suddenly gained a considerable priority upgrade.

She dropped down the ladder, then sprinted down the ramp, and finally flew down the stairs. By her estimation she had seconds left. The machines would have calculated the trajectory of her shot the moment bullet reached its target. She had as long a they would need to point a canon at her position.

Shooting someone inside the camp had required getting pretty close to it. Closer, much closer than they usually got. A high risk, but worth it. Hasting just hoped that those metal bastards, somewhere in their circuits, had enough self-awareness to bite their own asses that they let the enemy come knock on their front door without them noticing. _'You're going down,'_ she though grimly. _'And I'll be there to see it.'_

Or someone, anyway. Hasting reached the ground floor and started running as if her life depended on it, which it did. She thought about the poor bastards in that camp, how dying for them would be worth it, but she much rather wouldn't. She wanted to be there when the attack happened in a week or two. She wanted to see the people she had just risked her life and had killed for. And she had no less than two lovers waiting for her at her division. She didn't worry about them in the event of her death; they'd still have each other when she was gone, that was the beauty of this arrangement. But she'd much rather be there in the middle of it. Life wasn't perfect, but she wasn't ready to give it up yet.

The door was there, right in front of her. Behind it fifty meters of open field before she could drop down into a tunnel. This was the best position they'd been able to find for her. Hastings mobilized her last reserves and ran.

  


-

  


Corporal Alen Bryson flinched when the explosion hit the nearby building, just like he had flinched when he'd seen Donal die. He'd joined the confused, excited murmur when that happened, and now he joined everyone in looking around in more confusion, shock, and fear. It was important to keep up appearances, because at this point the bots would already be looking for people who stood out. Inside, he was just nervous, satisfied that the first part of their mission had worked well, and hoping that the sniper Connor had positioned to kill Donal had gotten out on time.

Not far from him, a flying machine lifted off and aimed for the building that had just lost its top floor to heavy explosives. It would be looking for the shooter that had validated Donal's claim of infiltration by taking him out before he could ever reach the point where he'd either give away too much or have to blow it by not actually giving away anything. Bryson didn't know what the escape plan looked like. He didn't really care. That wasn't his problem – _this_ here was.

His gaze found Sergeant Watanabe, who was watching the smoke rise up into the clouds from beside the barracks, her face stony as ever. Damn her – couldn't the woman at least _try_ to look like this wasn't normal? Donal, now that man's performance had been fantastic. Watanabe looked like she was watching a movie on the big screen. Bryson just hoped that the bots, if they saw her, found something in their data files about that cliche that Japanese people didn't show emotions in public and put her lack thereof on that, rather than on her being an enemy soldier who couldn't fucking act.

“What is going on there?” someone asked nearby. A murmur of voices answered, all speculating, all speculation generally going in the right direction. If there was fighting going on, that could only mean the army was near. No team of scavengers, no matter how desperate, would voluntarily get this close to the camp, and the machines would hardly fight each other.

“A malfunction?” a voice in all that chaos suggested, and Bryson rolled his eyes.

“It's Connor,” he said, trying to sound appropriately excited. “It must be. They've finally come to save us!”

“ _Finally_ save us?” someone echoed right behind him. Bryson turned and looked into the weathered face of a small, thin woman with gray streaks in her auburn hair. “You've hardly even been here for a week,” she pointed out as if that were some kind of contest.

“Doesn't mean I wanna die here,” Bryson pointed out.

“Well, you're gonna. You really think it's them?”

“Who else would it be?” someone else asked.

“Maybe something just randomly exploded?” suggested the one who had previously suggested the malfunction.

“Right after randomly shooting that guy in the head just when he was yelling about spies in this camp for all to hear?” Bryson retorted. “Come on!”

“Why would there be spies in here?” the woman asked. “What would they want in here?” But she sounded open to the idea. Wary, but interested. There was a chance that there was still some fight to be found here. When he'd initially arrived in the camp, Bryson hadn't been so sure.

“If they are really here, I guess we'll find out,” he said vaguely. What he wanted to do was pull all these people aside and tell them what was going on, why they were here, how they needed them to join the upcoming fight if they wanted to get out of here. But he needed to know he could trust them, first. If he revealed his identity too soon, they might just give him away.

Not yet. Not now. They had over a week to make things happen. Right now, they had to get to work or nothing would ever happen to them again.

  


-

  


Sergeant Watanabe had been among the first soldiers to arrive in the camp. There were ten of them, all having come here separately, to be less suspicious, and to minimize the risk of them all getting caught at once. Like this, chances were at least some of them would make it.

At least three soldiers had been caught by the machines and deported here long before the plan was hatched. Watanabe had hoped that those would be available to help them now, but so far she hadn't spotted any of them and feared that none of them had survived to this point. Or maybe she had missed them as there was only one whose face she even knew. Perhaps they would surface later. The mission could certainly use their help.

She looked around cautiously. It was after sunrise; she had had night shifts the past two days, had now been given a day shift again, which meant no sleep for her. The machines didn't usually do this, knowing it was ineffective, but if one shift was lacking manpower, that manpower was taken from the other one without consideration for the fact that the people here were being worked into the ground anyway. At least the work she'd been assigned wasn't all that physically taxing. Also, she was working in a group, and their work station was garbage sorting. Perfect.

It wasn't long before she had inconspicuously set aside everything she needed. Now all she was lacking was attention.

There were eight in the open hall with her. It was a large pile. A machine whirred past the opening every now and again, on predetermined, regular patterns. There were a few more guards now, but not many. The machines were watching everyone from a distance, looking for unusual behavior. Connor's plan to keep them from burning the place down had the disadvantage of making everything much more dangerous. But fortunately, the machines were not in a hurry, not knowing they ought to be. Impatience was an alien concept to them, as was curiosity. They were looking for spies because they were hoping to gain something from them, namely information. On their hideout, on how to intercept their transmissions, where to find Connor and their HQ.

There wasn't even an HQ anymore. Everything was much more spread out now. Partially that was due to the lack of accommodations large enough for so many people in the location where they needed to be, and partially that was because it made it harder to hit them all at once like this.

Watanabe had been among those chosen for this mission when it had been meant to go down originally, before the attack on their base had thrown them back two years in their planning. She had been waiting for this a long time and was eager to get it done.

The next step was upon her. She looked at the eight people working with her. Five men, three women, their ages ranging from undefinable on the young side to undefinable on the older side. In addition to that a kid of nine or ten years who came in with a card now and then to transport away some of the stuff they had sorted out. Watanabe dismissed that one as a factor and waited until the boy was out before she addressed the others in a low voice.

She didn't know them, not well, but in the last few weeks she and the other soldiers had initiated conversations and dropped comments here and there to see how everyone would react to the prospect of rescue, and having to fight for it. These here were all people she had not marked in her mind as potential threats to the mission. A risk remained, though – everyone was nervous and afraid, more so than before, since Donal had played his public drama and made the machines look for infiltrators everywhere.

So far they had picked out three people as suspicious and had taken them away. Watanabe knew that only one of them had actually been one of her fellow soldiers – the others had just been unlucky. She didn't know what had happened to them, but had to assume that the machines had figured out somewhere along the line (or through the vast archive on psychology, biology and history at Skynet's disposal) that humans were more willing to give up secrets if threatened with pain, or inflicted with pain and promised its cession. She didn't think about it too much, as it was something she couldn't influence anymore and also something that made her nervous, considering that she could easily suffer the same fate.

No machine had ever come for her or any of the eight others that were left, so Jacobs hadn't given them up. If he'd been clever he had carried a small blade he could kill himself with in just such a case. Watanabe did.

“I wonder what happened to the people the machines took for spies,” she threw into the room, quietly, so the words wouldn't ring outside. Everyone stopped working for a second, to look around if anything was listening. They looked uncomfortable. Understandable, but not helping.

“I wonder if any of them even were spies,” another picked up the threat. Watanabe was relieved to have it out of her hands.

“If they were, seems like _they_ didn't give up their buddies and their mission to save their own skin,” a third joined in. Clearly referencing Captain Donal and his seemingly poor performance on the day he was brought here, which had actually been a very good performance on his part. That people spoke ill of him now meant he had done his job well. He was also gone, so it didn't matter to him anymore, but some of the other soldiers still took offense when people called him a coward and a traitor and Watanabe had had to quietly stop Sergeant Stevens once before he could explode and ruin everything.

There had been a limited pool of volunteers to choose from for this mission; it could hardly be put on General Connor that he couldn't elect only people who were good in all aspects of this undercover assignment. Watanabe herself was not particularly comfortable with some of it as well. But that was what they had each other for. People like her held back people like Stevens, and people like Bryson started conversations so people like her didn't have to.

Unfortunately, Bryson was nowhere near right now. But then, the conversation was already picking up even without her doing anything more to contribute to it.

“If there even is a mission,” one of the older women said. “Come on, guys, do you really thing Connor would show up here after all this time? That old geezer was just pulling shit out of his ass to save it.”

“And the shot that killed him?” a young man argued.

“So _someone_ wanted him dead,” the woman conceded. “Or it was a friend who wanted to spare him worse.”

“Not this close to them camp! Why would anyone come here?”

“Why would Connor? No one's ever come to help us, and with all the shit I've seen in here, I'm not sure we deserve it anyway. Now, if the kind General had had the grace to show up here a few years earlier...” She trailed off, then shrugged. “If he even exists.”

“He does. The army does.”

“Well, either way, they sure as fuck don't give a crap about us. I bet they are having a pretty good life far from here, happy that the bots are too busy torturing _us_ to bother with them. And Connor is just the king of the lemmings. Must be pretty great to hold so much power over people who have nothing...”

It was pretty hard not to say something now, even for Watanabe. She had only met the General once, after she had been picked for this mission, but when he told her that he would go himself if he could she'd believed him. There was something honest and genuine about the man – never mind the fact that without him there would be no army. The leftovers of mankind would be scattered fractions selling each other out for survival and the machines would have won ages ago. And all of Watanabe's loved ones would be dead, rather than just most of them.

She had a hard time abiding anyone talking badly about this man she so admired and felt indebted to. But she did, for the moment, knowing that any strong reaction was dangerous at this time. Even though these people ought to feel indebted, too. Watanabe had volunteered for this assignment, as had all the others and then some, because the General had really sold it to them. Even after she'd been chosen, when it sank in that she was likely going to die and the doubt came. Connor had come to her and talked to her and managed to make her understand, without using those exact words, the situation the humans in the camp were in and how much they depended on them to help, and how noble and admirable it was for Watanabe and the others to do this for them. She had walked away from that conversation feeling a lot better about herself, and never since had she doubted that this was exactly the thing she needed to do.

Even in the long years this mission had been delayed.

“The army is here,” she said. When, if not now? “They are lying in wait for the right opportunity. They would have come years before but an attack of the machines kept them away.”

Everyone fell silent at that. Everyone looked at her. “And you would know?” the young man asked.

Sergeant Watanabe stood a little straighter. “But they will need your help to get you all out. They will need you to fight the machines from the inside. That is why we came. To teach you how.”

The silence continued. Then another woman, a younger one, hissed, “Are you crazy? You're one of _them_? You're trying to get us all killed!”

Watanabe had not seen this strong reaction coming in this group, but she had anticipated it none the less. “This place is getting you all killed, and there is no question about it. We're offering you a chance.”

“We're taking that chance!” the young man said, at once, inspiring a nod from, surprisingly, the older woman who had been so negative about the idea of the army. The younger woman, however, looked around wildly, in obvious fear. “Are you mad?” she hissed. “They are going to kill us! What if they heard us talk? They are going to kill us just for talking to you!”

“And what difference would that make?” One of the other men, a guy named Ames asked. “It's not like we have a lot to lose.”

“At least we're still alive,” a red-haired boy whose fuzzy beard looked like it was his first facial hair ever surprisingly backed the view of the young woman. “Eileen is right. We shouldn't even talk to you.” He turned to everyone else. “We should give her to the bots. That will show them that we're not with her.”

That _was_ surprising, after all. No, not surprising. But alarming. Things could go very wrong very quickly from here. Fortunately, Ames stepped up into the boy's path when he went to leave and the older woman said, “But we _are_ with her.”

“You should talk,” Eileen spat. “Complains all the time about Connor and the moment someone says he's actually here you're just too willing to stab us all in the back for him.”

“Right now you are the ones doing the backstabbing,” the woman pointed out.

“Okay, let's all calm down a bit.” Red Hair lifted his hands in a soothing gesture, obviously realizing the situation was getting away from them. “No one wants to stay here forever. But neither do we want to get killed. We didn't survive this long for that. So let's consider our options, okay?”

Amazingly, people did calm down a little. That was, however, not a good thing, Watanabe feared. She was proved right when after a minute of hissed discussion the red-head came to the conclusion that, yes, it was great that the camp was being freed, but chances were that wouldn't work, and then everyone involved would be punished. If they didn't help the effort would still go down, they would still profit from it if it worked, and there wouldn't be repercussions if it didn't. Also, there was less of a chance of getting killed in the fighting if they didn't participate in it.

It seemed that Watanabe had misjudged the drive for survival people had in a place like this. She had assumed they would be very willing to risk their lives as they had nothing to live for, but perhaps she should have considered that one didn't make it for years under circumstances like this if one didn't have well developed survival instincts.

And the ruthlessness required to let them take over. Watanabe had been aware that people tended to get by in the camps by taking advantage of weaknesses and selling each other out in one way or another, but somehow that knowledge had not touched her own situation until now, when Red Hair presented his arguments and the others seemed to be thinking them over. Eileen was evidently behind that plan, but even the older lady and Ames didn't jump up to argue right away and that was worrying indeed. How much longer until they agreed that in order for their plan to work, they needed to grab Watanabe and hand her over to the machines? Perhaps she should try to get out while she still could.

She was not, however, quite prepared to give this up yet.

Fortunately, things weren't as bad as she had feared with the others. The older lady had a look of disgust on her face when she finally turned to Eileen and asked, “So you're just gonna sit back and watch others die for you, and if it fails you're happy to keep doing this?” She indicated the pile of garbage in front of them. “You'd rather throw those who died fighting into the pit than risk your precious skin?”

“Don't act so holy. If you're smart you'll do the same thing. It's for the best.”

“It's not.” That was a new voice, and Watanabe needed a moment to find the speaker. It was the boy who had been coming and going all morning. He must have come in at some point during their discussion, silently, without announcing his presence, and Watanabe had no idea how long he'd been there and how much he had heard.

Enough, apparently. “No one will fight if they are all like you,” he said (and his voice sounded hoarse, Watanabe noticed, like he hadn't spoken in a very long time). “They'll just let things keep on going like this. We finally have a chance to fight back and you'll just do nothing.” The kid looked at Eileen and Red, angry and desperate. “We _all_ gotta fight for this!”

“What would you know?” Eileen snapped. “You stayed alive this long just to get killed, huh? You could have given up a long time ago if you wanted to die so badly. I, for my part, don't, and the fact that you're still breathing tells me you're a fucking hypocrite.”

“I stayed alive because I wanted to fight them,” the kid killed that argument. He turned to Watanabe. “I wanna fight with you,” he said to her. “Please show me how!”

“Kid's got it right,” Ames said, putting a supporting hand on the boy's back. The boy flinched and scurried over to the other side of the room, but he never took his eyes off Watanabe and Ames acted like it hadn't happened.

It reminded her of the other kids rescued from camps and how so many of them were too fucked up to be of any use to the army. Judging from what she just saw, this kid wouldn't be much different. There was something profoundly sad about that, especially considering that he evidently _wanted_ to join them, but it was a matter for another time and place. (The knowledge that he probably wouldn't live through the fighting and the problem would solve itself that way held no comfort at all.) In this time and place, the boy was someone to support her mission and that was all that mattered.

It was as if everyone had just needed this input to make a decision, because the discussion flared up again, briefly, and then the arguments of Eileen and Red were dismissed by everyone else, who were now not only willing to fight but increasingly eager to. In the end, Red even seemed to see their point; he stopped fighting them and agreed that this was the best coarse of action, the only one with a chance for success. Eileen was less inclined to change her mind, though. She stopped arguing when it became clear that the others were not with her, but it was obvious that she was still determined to get out of this.

Watanabe needed to watch her. She could become a problem.

And right now, her presence was keeping the soldier from revealing all the information the others needed to have. Who knew what that woman was going to do with it? She had retreated back towards the entrance of the hall and kept glancing out, as if worried a machine would come in and find her guilty by association. Or as if waiting for the right time to run.

Apparently, it was neither. “That's it,” she suddenly said. “There's a bot coming for us and I am going to tell it what you're doing. Steve, this is your last chance.” She turned to Red, who was obviously called Steve, challenge and desperation in her eyes. But she was also already leaving. And Watanabe was too far away to stop her.

She was, but one of the others wasn't. A man, named Peters if she wasn't mistaken, tackled her before she reached the exit and hit her hard in the back of the head when she tried to get back up and started to yell. Eileen fell silent, and Watanabe saw the metal box in Peters' hand, blood dripping off the edge.

“You killed her,” Steve gasped, breathless and shocked. Watanabe hurried over and checked to find that yes, he had.

“She was going to kill all of us,” Peters retorted, unfazed. A look around told Watanabe that none of the others seemed to be particularly shaken by this event. Wary, alarmed, grim – but not shocked or horrified by this death that just occurred in front of them. Not even the kid. In fact, when Peters called for help to get the body out of sight, the boy was the first to grab Eileen's feet so they could drag her behind the pile.

Peters threw the metal box back onto the garbage and the boy took Eileen's place at the sorting platform, and when the machine rolled past them it briefly looked into the hall, found nothing out of place, and rolled on.

Steve was standing where he needed to, but he was shaking and tears were running down his face. Watanabe wondered if that was shock, or fear, or if there had been some kind of bond between him and Eileen. Amed leaned over to him and said quietly, “You better not try to pull the same stunt,” the warning clear for all to hear.

Then they all looked at Watanabe and she became aware that this was the part where she told them everything. And she found that she needed a moment to gather her thoughts and push down her feelings. She was a soldier; she had seen a lot of death. But all the dead she had seen had been killed by the machines, or out of mercy. For all her experience in battle, in here she was the only one shaken by people getting killed by people, by the brutality of it. And while she agreed that Eileen had needed to be stopped, she wasn't sure how she felt about it.

Human lives were precious. General Connor kept reminding them of this every time he gave one of his rare speeches. Murder, or the reckless endangering of others, were not tolerated in the army and the bunkers. And no one Watanabe knew would ever think of killing another human being; they were small enough in numbers and the last thing they wanted to do was help the machines in their crusade against them.

And yet here she was, having witnessed a woman who was acting out of fear be clubbed to death in front of her, and all she could so was nod her acknowledgment to the man who had killed her.

In a few short words she outlined the plan, trusting that these remaining men and women were with her – including Steve, who would no doubt be watched closely for the moment, not getting the chance to follow Eileen's example. She spoke of the schedule for the attack without giving too many details, told them how many soldiers had infiltrated their camp without telling them who they were, and told them what part they had to play in all this. And how they were to do that.

“You want us to fight,” the elderly woman whose name Watanabe still didn't know eventually interrupted her. “But we don't have any weapons. And neither have you.”

“There will be arms when the others get here,” Watanabe promised. “Other than that we will have to make our own weapons.”

“Oh? And how do you imagine we do that? Just mix together all those lovely explosives the bots left lying around here?”

“As a matter of fact,” Watanabe confirmed. And showed them the household chemicals and other components she had picked out of the pile of garbage before the entire discussion started. “John Connor has showed us how to make explosives out of things available even here. They are simple, but effective. The machine guards employed here should have little defense against them.”

“Killer bots being defeated by kitchen products?” one of the others asked sceptically.

“You'll be surprised.” Watanabe didn't tell them that she hadn't seen them in action either and didn't know how effective they were in the end. She had seen them tested, though, when the General first showed them how to make them, and knew they should be effective enough.

Now she glanced outside. There were no time pieces here; the only way to tell the time was by the light outside, and the eternally overcast sky made that hard. But Watanabe had done most of her growing up after the war and knew how to read the hour in the reflection of light on the snow outside. They should have about three hours before they were expected to be done with this work. Plenty of time – although she'd have to split the group so some could keep working and keep up pretenses.

They'd already lost a lot of time and there would be repercussions if they didn't finish on schedule, so Watanabe decided to teach them two at a time. The ones who weren't chosen for the first group growled, but went back to work eager enough, well aware of the risk they were all taking. On Watanabe's instruction they put aside all chemicals she described, a well as metal pipes of roughly the right length. The lids had to be improvised and were a risk factor. Getting the nitro-base would have been hardest, but her comrades outside had figured out the harvesting pattern of the machines in the area they were currently clearing and had positioned a few convenient canisters in places they knew would be emptied soon, so the stuff would end up where it was needed. Finding one today had prompted her to start this. It was time.

The older lady was part of the second pair she instructed. She learned quickly, but eyed her first finished pipe bomb with a look of wry disdain when it was finished. “So that's what your fabled army is fighting the evil machine empire with? I must say, you're not all I imagined you to be.”

“We got better weapons than that.” Watanabe refused to take the bait, remained matter-of-factly. “This is making do with what we have here. It's something General Connor taught us specifically for this mission.”

“Why would your General need to know how to build pipe bombs from household products if you don't ever use them?”

“It's something he learned before the war, he told us.”

“Before the war?” That was the other part of this pair speaking, the little boy who was so eager to fight. He looked at Watanabe through wide, bloodshot eyes. “He's that old?”

The woman snorted, and Watanabe shook her head, bemused. “He's not much older than me,” she told him, half expecting him to now tell her that she was ancient, too. But he didn't. He just stared at her and then at the bombs thoughtfully, as if he were trying to figure out the secrets of the universe.

It dawned on her that he probably had a very vague idea of the time frame of their history. Having obviously been born many years after Judgment Day and growing up without any kind of education, pre-war had to be a distant and mystical time for him, shrouded in mystery. But that also meant that he couldn't have had a lot of close contact with people who remembered that time, even though half of those in this room alone were old enough to do that.

She sighed. This mission was even harder than she had thought it would be. She was, however, more convinced than ever that it was the right thing to do.

Under her instruction, the kid had created one bomb, then another without her help to see if the lesson stuck. Watanabe inspected the explosive now, and found it good.

“What's your name?” she asked the boy, who probably couldn't read or write, but knew how to make pipe bombs now.

He gave her one long look and hesitated so long that she thought he wasn't going to answer at all. “Kyle,” he finally said.

“I'm Ruka,” she introduced herself. “Kyle, do you know any good hiding places around here where we can store these bombs until we need them?” There were tunnels underneath the camp where the children hid during the nights. That might come in handy right now. Perhaps having a few small ones to work with them wouldn't be so bad after all.

Kyle thought for a moment, then nodded. For now, all the bombs would remain here, until it was time to leave. The next two came, and then two more and two more. The others worked on the pile of garbage with a sense of urgency, and Kyle occasionally went outside with his wagon to take certain articles to their next processing station. Every time Watanabe was worried he might not come back for some reason but he always did, and in the end they finished on time, barely.

When there was hardly anything of their pile left, Watanabe called Kyle over. “The attack will happen in about a week,” she told him quietly. “I need you to find a place where these are safe until then, and to get them out so we can use them when the time comes. Can you do that.”

He nodded wordlessly and reached for the improvised bombs lined in a hidden corner of their work hall. There were fifteen altogether, and Watanabe had hidden seven of them in the inside pockets of her wide coat. Kyle took the other ones and started to hide them similarly, inside his sleeves, pockets, and the waistband of his oversized pants.

“Be careful with that,” Watanabe warned. “Get rid of them as soon as possible, and stay away from the fire pots while you have them. You could end up blowing yourself up with those.”

Kyle nodded solemnly and made a non-committal sound in the back of his throat before he closed his coat and disappeared outside to whatever other task the machines had in store from him. Watanabe would seek him out tomorrow, to ask where he had hidden the bombs in case something happened to him before he could get them when the time came.

When she stepped out of the hall after everyone else, something felt different. It wasn't just her, having completed another small step of her mission, it was the others, too, who moved with more energy, somehow. With more determination. And it was good, she thought, that the machines never learned humans well enough to read their moods, or they would know that change was coming, and that all these people walking out of this hall, even Steve, would have a part in it.

  


-

  


Twenty-some meters underneath an abandoned school building in Long Beach, John Connor looked at his watch as if it could give him some kind of countdown. As if it would say “T minus two days”. But it only said that it was five minutes past midnight. T minus one day, then. Just as well.

Though he didn't show it, he was restless. And so was everyone else. It wasn't just the tension that came before a big mission. This time, it felt different – perhaps because everyone knew that this would probably be the last camp to ever be liberated, and they wanted to make it count. Or maybe they were, like him, irrationally worried that the machines would get what was going on too soon and kill everyone before the army even got there.

No – it wasn't irrational. It was a very real possibility. And it made John feel like any moment they waited could be one too many.

Around him, preparations were made. Everyone was busy. He would need to make sure that everyone also tried to get some sleep before the action – including himself. By now he knew his limit on how long he could go without rest and still function. The adrenaline rush on the battlefield would get him through the fighting, sure, but he knew that afterward it would be a long time before he got the chance to step back and let someone else take over while he took an hour or two for food and rest.

He checked his equipment for the last time before they left this base. In an hour, they would move north, close to the camp, and stop one last time to get everyone and everything ready. Looking around the hall he couldn't find Kate, but he heard her voice from somewhere around a corner, giving instructions to her own team. Most of the medics would stay behind here, where it was a little safer, but some would come with them to take care of anyone who needed help immediately after the fighting was over, and Kate was one of those. She hadn't let them talk her out of it, and John hadn't expected her to.

Another person who had been adamant to go but less successful in getting her will was Jeanette. She was here right now, somewhere in this small base, steaming with anger at her dad, along with her sister who was angry at John out of solidarity. In a fight Lou would always pick Jeannie's side over that of either of her parents, and considering that Jeannie was the only member of her family who always had time for her that was hardly surprising.

Lou had never demanded much attention. Sometimes John forgot that she needed more than she was getting anyway.

Jeanette was another matter. She had never stopped wanting to be a soldier, no matter how many wounded she had seen losing limps, or dying in medical, or how unfiltered John had told his stories of gruesome battles and the long, uneventful freezing cold and miserable days in between. And she was eleven years old now – the youngest members of the army were ten. She couldn't accept that her parents wouldn't let her sing up, nor was she open to the argument that none of the really young ones would be involved in an attack like this. On top of that was the resentment she still carried for her father over that day two years ago when he had dragged her out of the burning bunker, leaving Christina for dead.

Ironically, it was this that had offered John an argument to use against her.

Did she really think, he'd asked her, that that situation was new to him, that he hadn't faced the decision to leave injured or trapped men behind countless times before? Did she think that if she became a soldier she would never have to do just what she hated her father for right now? It was naive to believe that she would be spared that, or that it would only ever happen to people she didn't care about. Once she became a soldier it might be her who had to leave someone like Chrissy to the flames in order to save someone else or the mission as a whole, and if she couldn't do that, she would be a liability rather than an asset and had no place in the army.

John had attempted for some time by then to fix things between him and his oldest, and if he'd had more time at his hands at that moment, if he hadn't had his head full of other problems, he probably would have handled this different. Same message, less harsh. But he hadn't had time for it, his daughter's issues had just added more worries to a buck load, and he'd come across sounding irritated and mean. Consequently, Jeanette had stormed out then, hurt and even more angry than before. Louisa had followed out of solidarity, after one long glare at her dad, and all John had been left with was the urge to bury his face in his hands and groan.

“If it was your goal to antagonize both your daughters today, great job,” Kate had remarked dryly. It wasn't even that she didn't agree, or that she didn't hope like him that Jeannie had at least gotten the message and would stop trying to get herself killed for maybe another few months. But they both knew that now it was up to her to fix things, and she had just as little time for that as John did.

He'd never had a father, he'd thought. That ought to count as a good excuse for failing at being one.

Which brought him back to the issue at hand. ( _Don't think about Reese,_ he reminded himself. _He might be in there or he might not. By settling on this course of action that essentially sacrifices the other camps you may just as well have killed him, and yourself, and everyone else. There's no way to know and no way to change what you started. One way or another, there's nothing you can do but see this through._ )

T minus thirty-nine hours. They seemed to crawl by like molasses, and yet there was so much to do and not enough time to do it.

  



	16. 2020 - 2/3

Watanabe didn't know the day the attack would come, but she knew the time of day. Just after sundown. That time when the machines started to rely on infrared and heat sensors. Things that fires would mess with. And there would be fires, of that there was no doubt.

She was ready to go every day, and every day nothing happened. It didn't bear to be impatient, she reminded herself. The General and the others were out there. The time just had to be right, else this would fail.

If they were not out there, she would be stuck here. Until she died. The horror that came with the thought reinforced her determination to get as many of these people out as possible.

Sadly, in order to do so she would have to greatly endanger them first. Watanabe looked around, over the people walking around her, working, doing what they always had done despite the nervousness and anticipation that lay over the entire camp. It was getting dark and the shifts were about to switch in an hour. Back at the containers, those working the night shift were about to be woken, while the ones working during the day were finishing their last tasks in a hurry, wanting to get it all done so they wouldn't have to work three shifts in a row.

No one would get any sleep tonight. The signal had come an hour ago, at the onset of dusk: Distant explosions lighting up the sky far away – a sign of fighting, not all that uncommon lately, but in this case the number and sequence of those flashes of light had been significant. _Get ready_ , they said. _We're coming_.

Watanabe hadn't even seen it, had missed it while standing neck deep among piles of bodies. Stevens had told her, in a whispered remark as he was walking past her. Now it was up to her to tell as many others as she could.

And hope that none of these undisciplined, desperate, and scared people messed everything up.

She told everyone she had instructed in the weeks before: seventeen men and women altogether, on four days. Children, too, although it didn't feel right to use the word on these kids whose childhood had been cut short long ago, if they ever even had anything resembling a childhood to begin with. The others had accomplished similar numbers on the average, and some of the recruited inmates had passed the message one to people they trusted. But trust was a scarce good around here, and to make matters worse they had lost a few of their recruits to accidents and sortings, and in two cases to suspicion of being spies of the army. One of them must have given up his recruiter, Corporal Dysam, because the machines came for her half a day later. She managed to kill herself before they ever reached her and Watanabe was still aching from the loss.

That had been yesterday. One day too early. One.

Now eight soldiers, just over a hundred nervous but prepared inmates, and twice as many people they either hadn't trusted enough to tell them about their plans or hadn't gotten around to informing, were about to face the battle that would either get most of them out of here or kill them all. Watanabe finally spotted Kyle among the hunched figures coming over from the direction of the chimneys that kept snowing ash on them all day, every day. Not a lot. But constantly. (Watanabe was astonished that there were still bodies around to burn, and so many of them. The remains of six billion people, it seemed, needed a long time to clean up.)

The boy looked tired and haunted, as he always did, but his face showed signs of life when she asked him where he had hidden the explosives. There were a few hiding places by now. Altogether she and her recruits had created more than thirty of the primitive pipe bombs and Kyle had somehow ended up in charge of hiding them. Watanabe had told him to spread them out in different places in case one stash was found, but as far as she knew, none had been. He had hidden them well.

Now, Watanabe and a man called Erics followed him around as he collected them, each taking fifteen and stuffing them into their coats, with Kyle taking the remaining three. He didn't hesitate to show them his secret hideouts, and even though they sometimes couldn't follow them down to where he had made the stash, Watanabe found that remarkable in the face of the fact that he couldn't stand to have anyone touch him, or stand closely behind him for that matter. She wasn't great at reading people, but she had noticed that. Still he gave away his hiding places as if he was absolutely certain that he wouldn't need them anymore.

And he wouldn't. By next morning, he would either be out of here or dead. (Much as Watanabe avoided thinking about it, she knew which was more likely. There would be casualties, even if they won.)

The change in shifts was complete. Now they had to wait for the attack to start. Watanabe walked around the rows of beds in the containers where people were just now crawling into their uncomfortable sleeping spaces, and handed out pipe bombs to all of her recruits with a warning to stay alert. Some she had to wake up – they had been soundly asleep the moment they lay down, the long days and short nights having drained them to the bone. Watanabe could sympathize, and she had only been here for a few weeks. Now she had to make it through another hour sitting on an arsenal without being detected. Just one hour. It would be inconvenient to be made now. No, not inconvenient, she thought. Tragic. Like Dysam's death yesterday. The fact that it was only one hour was little comfort.

A machine whirred by, looked at her, and moved on.

The hour stretched endlessly. And passed. Watanabe had no timepiece, but she was sure of it. It was not a reason to be nervous, to despair. The hour had been an estimate. It didn't mean no one was coming.

Another hour passed. Or did it not? If she had a watch, would she be surprised to see how little time had actually gone by? Her sense for it was bad under pressure, and she had never been as tense as she was now. Her eyes sought Corporal Bryson, two bed rows away. He seemed nervous, but not desperate. Certainly, it was just her.

Everyone else was nervous, too. No one slept. There was commotion somewhere in the distance, among the workers of the night shift. A single shot was fired. Tragic, Watanabe thought. Then the fence exploded.

  


-

  


For all that there were years of planning going into this, the general estimate was that the battle would last no longer than an hour. Fifteen minutes at first, when the army ran against the defenses of the camp, blew them up, and destroyed as many of the metal guards in there as they could find. There were plenty. The number had grown steadily since more and more of the camps had fallen, and John knew that they were ready to stop defending against the attackers and just kill all the inmates when it looked like they would lose this fight. That was why the first fifteen minutes were the most dangerous, and why they had armed the inmates and given them the means to destroy the machines the soldiers couldn't get to in time.

The heavily armed and armored ones were at the front, the weaker ones would be send to take care of the presumably defenseless prisoners. That was why they had a chance.

That was what they predicted and that was what happened. John was leading the attack, snapping orders into his headset while simultaneously filtering all the information he was receiving. He could understand why the military leaders of old tended to not actively fight and focused on the information and the orders instead, but he had to – because he wanted to, and because at this point it was expected of him. Instead of a safe spot overseeing the battlefield from which he could coordinate is men, he had a team of four flanking him to make sure he didn't get blown up or shot n the back while he was focusing on the wrong thing.

A bust of fire on his left, aimed backwards. John turned and saw that Ava had just saved them all from being moved down by a caterpillar-bot, a rather new addition to Skynet's arsenal that moved on twenty short legs and was adorned with a turret at its front end. He hadn't expected to see them here, not yet. Quickly, he gave a warning to the other teams, even while he nodded his appreciation to his lieutenant.

Things started blowing up in earnest now. John saved his own charge, not needing it yet. This kind of weapon would be more effective during the second part of the battle, when the reinforcements showed up. Even with the army having thinned out the machine presence in the city during the last years, there were still enough around to become a problem once they got here, most of them stemming from a factory just out of town that was right now under attack by three units who got all the heavy guns John didn't want to use here due to all the very fragile prisoners running around.

Even so, people got caught in the crossfire. John had to turn away from the heat of a nearby explosion, and when he could see again another two were lying in the mud not far from him, one of them on fire. There were bodies everywhere now. Some of them he recognized as soldiers, some wore the uniform pants and thin shoes of the camp inmates. Some were children. Both among the military and the civilian casualties. (They hadn't taken the really young ones to this mission, but to John and anyone brown before Judgment Day, people around fourteen or fifteen were still kids.)

As John and his team broke through a wall of smoke near the barracks at the west side of the camp, he saw one of those kids, one from the camp, jump onto the shoulders of a vaguely human-shaped machine with guns for hands from the top of one of the low buildings and stuff something into the gab between the chest-chassis and the swiveling head. The machine threw the boy off with an awkwardly robotic yet powerful movement, making him fly a good few meters through the air and, ironically, probably saving his life with it. The thing the kid had stuck into it had been one of the pipe bombs the infiltrating soldiers had the inmates create to defend themselves. John realized that a split-second before the thing exploded and took half of the machines top off.

The kid landed hard on the frozen ground, immediately trying to push himself up but failing. He looked dazed. Checking left and right for new threats, then relying on his team to take care of any that might emerge, John hurried over to help him up and provide cover if needed, driven by some kind of parental instinct that still made most adults want to protect the children – even those that blew up killer machines with pipe bombs. In this case, however, his help wasn't wanted. Ten seconds after the boy had fallen John was pulling him upright. Three seconds after that, teeth were closing down onto his hand as the kid bit him, hard.

Cursing, the John drew his hand back and the boy scurried away, disappearing into the layer of smoke. Doubtlessly to blow something else up. John just hoped he didn't run straight into getting blown up himself.

When he returned to the others, Will chuckled softly but without any humor. “Don't worry, Sir. They don't let them get rabies here.”

“Lucky me,” John muttered, directing his attention to their surroundings again. No new danger had appeared in the thirty seconds since that machines had gone up in smoke but mostly that seemed to be because danger was already done with this place.

There was so much death around them, it was hard to believe there would by anyone left when this was over. And yet, he knew there would be – so many he would be surprised. This wasn't the first time they did this.

But never before had the prisoners they came for been this much at risk. Once the first wave was over and they had a moment (the briefest of moments) to take in their surroundings and prepare for the arrival of the much stronger reinforcements, John saw in the light of the fire an entire group of dead people – perhaps twenty of them, some lying on a pile, some spread out and facing the other way. Shot while running away, he noted. The shell of a burned-out machine was nearby, destroyed just that little bit too late. Other prisoners were running around, some in mindless panic, diving into hiding places, others collecting the dropped weapons of fallen soldiers and running into the smoke to shoot at the last machines that were still moving.

Between the cries of the wounded, there were yells of rage. The wounded always won out. Perhaps he should have taken Jeanette to see this after all, John thought distantly. It would certainly put a damper to her taste for battle.

Defeating the machines stationed directly at the camp had taken its toll but it hadn't taken a lot of time. Thirteen minutes. They were well within schedule. Right now, they should have five to ten minutes to prepare for the reinforcements.

First of all, they had to get everyone not armed out of the line of fire. John didn't have to tell his soldiers to go and herd the prisoners away from the battlefield. They wouldn't be safe outside the camp, but they would be safer than here. A small group of soldiers would accompany them and lead them ever further away while the rest tried to keep the newly arrived machines off their asses. The next round would confront them with harder enemies, but at least there wouldn't be as much risk of civilians betting in the way of bullets and explosions, so fighting would actually be easier.

And then it would be over. After this camp had fallen, they would not only have accomplished their objective of several years, they would also have taken a great step towards taking L.A. out of Skynet's control. Not the final step, but it would be a start.

That, however, was something John would have to focus on later. Just now he was being informed that the first HKs had been spotted, ETA three minutes for the aerials. Not a lot of those, because there weren't a lot of those overall, but enough to become a problem. The flying ones were always particularly dangerous and hard to destroy. Five of the large ground ones were coming as well. Easier to hit, but a lot of fire power that would level this place if they let it. John was glad he still had his charge. That would take out one – two if he timed it right and got the chance. Most of the others still carried theirs as well. Unfortunately, they hadn't had enough to hand out more than twenty, and one at least had been used already, another had been lost when the soldier carrying it had been set on fire.

Once they started going up all over the place, the EMPs they emitted would fry all their communications, so John had to give his final orders _now_.

He did. And then they fought. The teams further out had already thinned out the crowd of machines coming for them now, but it was still a hard and difficult battle. At least they could fire at will now. Most of the prisoners were gone, and the ones who had stuck behind after obtaining a weapon knew not to run into the line of fire. John's charge took out an aerial hunter killer, Ava's one of the big ground ones along with a number of smaller bots flanking it. Their coms, as predicted, died. But their guns still worked, and the armor-piercing bullets and magnetic explosives did a good job taking out the smaller machines that remained after all the big ones had gone.

Unfortunately, the enemy had armor-piercing bullet as well that went through their Kevlar vests as if they didn't exist. Will fell, and Joshua was injured when a bullet hit one of those parts of his body that wasn't even protected by anything, He would live, though. He even continued fighting. For all the five minutes the battle kept going after that.

They stretched.

  


-

  


Eventually, it was over. John checked his time piece and saw that altogether, less than an hour had passed since they had begun their attack. Just as predicted. Time always stretched on the battlefield.

What the fighting had left them with were smoldering wrecks of giant machines, ruined buildings, numerous dead and wounded, countless fires and ears ringing from the noise of explosions. Smoke drifted over the desolation left behind as John stepped towards the large spot full of nothing in front of him. Nothing burned there, no one was calling for help of crying out in grief over there. It was as if in the center of the camp the world simply stopped existing.

Before him the ground dropped sharply. In the light of the flames he could make out, barely, the idea of naked bodies some ten or fifteen meters below him. John stared in silence. After a long moment he turned away to take in the events on the other side of him.

The fence was down, taken out in several places by explosions, and by big machines just waltzing over it. Between its remains and the hole was a wide, open place, filled with debris, and motionless bodies, and people wandering around between them. John recognized some of them as the medically trained soldiers who had been held back during the battle so they would be available to administer first aid afterward doing just that. He also recognized some as inmates – former inmates now – who had not left with the others but fought with the army against the machines who had enslaved them for so long.

One of them was the kid who had bitten John earlier. He was walking slowly and looking downward as if searching for something – or someone. John was distantly surprised that he was still here, and that he had survived. Now the fighting was over and he actually got a good look at the boy, he estimated him to be about nine or ten years old, eleven at best. Under the torn, half-burned knee-long coat that had clearly belonged to an adult once, he was scrawny as hell, and underneath his dirty woolen cap a mass of dirty, tangled hair of indeterminable color spilled onto his shoulders and framed a face with gaunt cheeks and blood-shot eyes.

Who knew how long that kid had been in here? It could be years. John's thoughts wandered to his father again, with a certain dread that he found comfort from in the certainty that this, right there, couldn't be him. The child was too young – Reese had to be around thirteen now. And if he was indeed here, chances were he'd be in a better state than that. Somewhat.

Thinking about it made John uneasy, as always – more so than ever now because things were becoming so real. He thought about his mother as well, unbidden, then forced all those thoughts aside. Behind the kid, almost out of John's field of vision, someone was setting up the emergency transmitter they had stored somewhere off the area of action to establish contact after their other equipment got fried. They weren't done yet. John was about to walk over to them when Ava broke through the smoke, supporting Sergeant Watanabe, one of the soldiers who had infiltrated the camp in preparation of this attack.

Grim as he was feeling, John couldn't keep the genuine smile of relief off his face when he saw her alive, not did he try to. She had been hit in the tight, but when asked informed him it was just a flesh wound. Her report was very short. This was not the time and the place for it. Now was the time and place for organizing their orderly retreat to the makeshift base where the medics and civilian helpers were waiting, before Skynet could send more machines to look for them, and to take out whatever was left of this place. They'd leave as soon as the transmitter was working. Already, soldiers were calling for everyone's attention. John could hear them in the distance.

The boy wandering over the battlefield either did not hear the call, or simply ignored it. He has stopped beside the body of a soldier who had fallen face down to the ground and wasn't moving. John knew he was dead, had seen another soldier check him earlier, but they boy obviously hadn't. Or maybe he had – John had initially thought that he was trying to see if the man needed help, but as he and the others were watching, the kid lifted one shoulder of the body, then the other, and surprisingly quickly pulled the coat off the dead man.

John sighed and looked away, meeting the scowl on Ava's face as she watched the same thing. “I've seen this before,” he told her. “It's how people survive here. You take what you can get or you die.”

“I know that,” Ava replied irritably. With a sigh or her own she pushed a strand of hair back under her hijab. One of her gloves was missing. “It's just sad, that's all.”

“It is,” Watanabe confirmed. She looked at the kid who was now wrapping his new coat around his thin body, then wrapped his arms around himself and hunched over as he walked away, never noticing the three soldiers watching him. Suddenly, he looked like he was freezing. John could sympathize; he knew what it felt like when the adrenaline wore off.

Watanabe started to follow him, then nearly fell. Ava and caught her, but made no move to help her go after the boy. “I need to ask him something,” the sergeant explained, looking down at her hand. Only now did John notice that she was holding something that looked like a necklace or bracelet.

“What is that?” John asked.

“One of the women I recruited was wearing it under her clothes. I found it with her corpse. Keeping personal possessions here was dangerous, so it must have meat something for her. I was wondering if there was anyone here who'd want it, but I don't know her name. That boy there was in the same group when I recruited her, so maybe he knew her and can point me to anyone who'd care.”

John nodded his understanding. It was sentimental, but if they didn't allow for some sentiment every now and then, what was the point of saving the world from robot-rule in the first place? There were enough people around who seemed robotically pragmatic and detached, and when he had first met her, Sergeant Ruka Watanabe had seemed like one of them. It was actually a relief to see that there was still a human in there, somewhere.

He was just about to ask her if she knew that kid's name when Evie called him over because the transmitter was working and the base wanted to know if they were still alive.

  


-

  


The baby was finally asleep. Kate sighed, thanking the universe for small mercies. She put the basket the infant was lying in into a corner of the room, half-hidden by some equipment, where it wouldn't be seen immediately but where she could have an eye on it, and cursed the fact that it was here at all. Someone had been supposed to watch the baby, but _someone_ had better things to do.

She sighed in irritation, then swallowed her anger for the moment. Things were as they were and she had to deal with them like that. If it meant she'd have a six-month-old in the examination room where she would have to check over a long line of traumatized and quite possibly mentally unstable people who had spend the previous years in an extermination camp run my killer machines, so be it.

Fortunately, her civilian helper today was a tall, strong former soldier named Jack who had lost an eye and a hand in battle but looked intimidating enough when he wanted to. Currently, he did not want to and kept to the background. Which was good, because if he had no other setting than “striking fear in the heart of mortal men”, this would be the last place he should be.

He _could_ be intimidating and strong if Kate and the baby needed him to. She hoped they wouldn't and didn't actually think they would. For now, she needed him to hand her things, help her lift people who couldn't get onto the examination table on their own, keep the supply of clean water going, and be a sign for the former inmates that they had now entered a world where crippling injuries no longer meant instant death. The latter came to be by chance, but Kate soon found that Jack's presence did indeed seem to have a rather comforting effect on most of those coming through her room.

Not all of them, though. Halfway through the afternoon she glanced into the room where five people were currently waiting and found that the one next in line was a kid. Dirt and gauntness made his age hard to guess, but it was obvious that he was young, possibly not even a teenager. And kids that young who had spend any time in those camps tended to get nervous around grown men, particularly around tall and strong ones. Some even lost it. Admittedly, some lost it over seemingly nothing, and there was not much Kate could do to prevent that, but at least she could minimize the risk.

There were three rooms in which medics and their helpers were taking care of these people and checking them over, and for a moment Kate simply considered sending the kid somewhere else. But Li and Giselle shared a room, which might mean too many people for the probably traumatized kid to bear, and Steven was a big and intimidating man himself. She was the best choice here. She just had to send Jack out for this one.

So she did, and he didn't even ask as he went to wait outside until she was done with this client. Calling the kid in she saw that it was a boy, with long, dirty hair that may just as well never have seen a hairbrush. He wouldn't have lice, she knew – the machines took care of that, at least – but she'd still suggest cutting it off. It was simply the easiest way to deal with that mess.

He looked around with strange focus, as if he needed to take in her and the entire room in a manner of seconds. Kate held her breath when his eyes lingered on the corner where she had half-hidden the baby, but his attention settled on her before she was done mentally kicking herself for not making Jack take the basket when he left.

She didn't have his full attention. Half of it was on the door, on looking for an alternate way out. Her heart twisted a little, in a way that Melissa's memory made her embrace rather than fight. He looked about ten or eleven, but Kate knew that starvation often made kids look younger than they were. Still, everything about the sight was heartbreaking, and she half-expected the boy to lose it and run away.

He didn't, but he didn't exactly look relaxed either, wrapping himself ever tighter into his coat. A coat like the ones the soldiers were often wearing, which ought to be rather short but covered this kid past his knees and probably hid bullet holes and the blood of the former owner somewhere in the dark fabric. In that, at least, it matched the grimy pants and dirt-caked shoes the boy was wearing. Kate didn't know yet how long he had been in that camp, but his appearance and general mannerism told her it had been a while.

Which made him pitiable, but also, as Kate knew from experience, potentially dangerous. That didn't mean that he had shot the soldier whose coat he was wearing himself just to take it, and Kate didn't think he had, but she still moved to position herself between the kid and the baby.

One moment later she regretted it. Judging by the was the boy looked at her, he knew what she was doing, which meant that she had just given away a weakness. Once again she cursed the fact that the infant was here at all.

“Hi, I'm Kate,” she finally introduced herself, mostly to distract him. She still made an effort to appear as friendly and non-threatening as possibly, remembering that all other things aside she was dealing with a traumatized person – if not necessarily with a traumatized child. “Why don't you take off your coat and hop onto that table, so I can check you over?”

The boy immediately took a step back and he impossibly wrapped the coat even tighter around himself. It was this movement that gave him away – Kate's trained eye picked up the difference in the way he moved his arms. He hid it well but the left one was definitely injured.

And obviously he thought that if Kate saw that, something terrible would happen to him. Because in his world that was normal. She could understand that, had seen it before, but it was going to make things difficult. Several years of fear would not be easily shaken off.

And she definitely needed to check out that arm, so letting it go until he had calmed down and accepted that this place wouldn't hurt him was not an option. That could take days, weeks.

“I can see you are hurt,” she therefore said, knowing it would scare him but hopefully he'd get that if she wanted to punish him for his injury she would have done so already. “I'm going to help you get better, if you'll let me. It's your arm, right?”

As expected, he turned even paler and took another step back, his eyes searching the now closed door. To her relief, he didn't go for it. Though there was still a lot to do today and too little time for it, Kate gave him a moment to make up his mind. It turned out to be the right thing to do, for eventually he looked at her again and nodded ever so slightly. “It's not bad,” he told her. His voice was scratchy and quiet and very calm.

“I'd like to look at it anyway. Will you let me?” Making it sound like he had a choice seemed like a good idea, but from the way his eyes sought the door again she could tell that he wasn't falling for it. He still let her coax him out of his coat, holding on to it when she tried to put it away.

“This is far too big for you,” Kate pointed out, even as she let him keep it. “I have something better waiting for you later, that fits and is clean.” She wasn't sure about the fitting, actually, but at least the clothes they had prepared for the new arrivals were clean.

Cleaner than what he was wearing anyway. They wouldn't remain that clean after he put them on, but Kate didn't think yet about trying to make him bathe. She would have to, but for now, she could only fight one battle at a time.

“What's your name?” she asked gently, while she looked at his arm. There was blood on the sleeve and he looked even more anxious when he saw it. Hardly surprising, with him coming from a world where bleeding meant death. Kate hoped to engage him in conversation and distract him that way but he didn't seem to have anything to say to her.

At least he let her work, and Kate just kept trying. “Have you been shot?” she asked. Not a good way to distract him from the injury, but something she needed to know. Again, he didn't answer, but when she pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, she saw that it was a cut in his forearm close to the elbow that caused all the bleeding. It was deep, but nothing important seemed to have been affected. Still, she needed to fix it, and that was going to be a problem.

Or maybe it wasn't. The kid held still and neither protested nor tried to stop her when she closed the gash with as few stitches as possible. Instead he watched intently and with something like fascination as she actually did something to fix him. She'd been worried that he would mistake it for her hurting him since she inevitably had to cause him pain, but evidently he understood the difference. When she was done wrapping the arm in clean gauze, he flexed it carefully and then stared at her in amazement.

She was just about to think that maybe she could get this boy out of the rest of his clothes so she could check him over after all, when two things happened.

The first thing was the baby waking up. It started fussing, then crying softly for attention. And it got the attention of the boy from the camp without effort. In fact, all his attention instantly focused on the corner where the basket was, and then he started walking over there.

Kate's first instinct was to stop him, or to snag up the baby before he could reach it, but she managed to hold herself back. A strong reaction could easily destroy what little progress she had made here. And the kid didn't seem aggressive, just fascinated. He probably hadn't ever seen an infant before in his life.

 _'No living one, anyway.'_ The thought came into Kate's mind unbidden, but she pushed it away. To her relief the kid didn't try to touch the baby, in which case she _would_ have interfered, but just stood there, staring at it. After a moment he turned to look at her, question and something like awe written all over his dirty face.

Kate smiled at him and was about to say something to him about the baby and why it was here, when the second thing happened: The door opened, and John came in.

In his defense, he knocked. But he knocked a split second before he opened the door, not giving anyone the chance to tell him to stay the fuck out. It was a habit Kate hated – and something he didn't usually do when she was with a patient. He'd probably seen Jack outside the room and thought she was taking a break, Kate thought later. In this moment she didn't think anything beyond her shock and surprise and the boy from the camp finally freaking out.

Kate was distracted by the door opening only for a second, but that second was enough for the boy to move – event though John's entrance had to take him by surprise, too, he didn't give up even a millisecond freezing or checking out the situation but immediately reacted, so quickly it was like a reflex. It probably was – the reflex to run at the slightest sign of danger. Except he didn't run for the door at the side of the room, the only other exit. At least not immediately. He grabbed the baby first. _Then_ he ran for the door.

And that was when Kate cried out. And John, automatically, drew his weapon. And the kid pulled and pushed at the door, only to find it wouldn't open. It wasn't actually locked. But it had an opening mechanism he obviously didn't know how to operate, and upon finding that way blocked, the kid didn't waste any further time trying but immediately went for one alternative he had for flight.

For cases just like this they didn't keep any kind of weapon in the room. The did, however, have bottles of water standing around. The kid grabbed one now, smashed it against the table, and it splintered in his hand, cutting him badly. He held on to the jagged piece that remained in his grip, his face pale, tight-lipped, and determined. The baby was wailing in earnest now, and Kate's heart was pounding in her throat while she thought that the kid was going to threaten the little one to get out of here. He could go for all she cared, as long as he handed that baby back before he did.

She didn't worry for long. The screaming infant held tightly against his shoulder with one hand and wielding his makeshift weapon in their direction with the other, the boy pressed into the corner while eying John as the primary threat that was between him and the door, and when Kate's brain finally caught up with the events unfolding far too fast before her, she grasped that he was trying to protect the baby from them.

No, not from them. From John. Who now looked ready to tackle the little boy to the ground in order to get back the screaming infant. Just seconds now and he would find a way to do just that without endangering the baby, she knew, and she couldn't even blame him because one moment ago she had been willing to do the same. Now, however, she moved herself between her husband and the kid, blocking John's path of attack and trusting him to take her lead on this.

At the same time she was blocking the kid's view of John, hoping that would help, but it just made him even more nervous. Finally, she gestured for John to step back and let her handle this, hoping the kid would relax when he saw the strange scary man back off.

She didn't even turn around to see if John did it. She could tell from the way the kid followed his retreat across the room with his eyes that he did.

“You don't need to worry,” she said softly, hiding her own anxiety as she bend down and reached out her arms. Asking for the baby rather than trying to take it. “That's John, my husband. He's the baby's father, he's not going to hurt him.”

The kid looked doubtful and even vaguely confused. For a long moment, his eyes kept going from Kate to John and back, obviously not certain if he could trust them with this little one.

“He's crying because he wants his mommy and daddy,” Kate told him. “Please give him to me. I bet he's very scared right now. And I know you don't want to scare him, do you?”

She could have pointed out that there was no way past them out of this room, but somehow she didn't think that was going to help any. Instead she kept talking softly and finally her reaching hands touched her baby boy and the kid didn't try to hold on when she pulled him out of his arms.

Relief flooded through her, but she didn't give herself even a second to hold her baby close. Instead, she passed it on to John and then nodded at the door. “Out,” she hissed, in a tone that said that she was very, very pissed and that there would be Words.

When she turned back to the kid, however, she didn't let any of that anger show. It wasn't directed at him, after all.

He was still standing in the corner, looking mostly lost now. And he was still clutching that broken bottle, though he wasn't pointing it at anything anymore.

“It's alright,” she assured him. “Thank you for handing him back. His dad grateful, too.”

The kid looked at the door that was once again closed. He looked unsure, like he wasn't certain he had done the right thing.

“It's really okay,” Kate said again. “His dad isn't going to hurt him. Have you ever heard of John Connor?” Chances were he had not, if he'd been in the camp long enough, but the boy gave him her full attention at the mention of the name. It seemed John's legend had penetrated even the darkest corners of the earth. “That was him, just now,” Kate explained. “So you can trust me when I tell you that he's not going to hurt any babies, especially not his own.”

The kid's eyes widened, and then he still looked lost, but also kind of desperate as his eyes locked on the door again. It took Kate a moment to get what had to be going through his mind now. “Don't worry,” she said hastily. “John knows as well as me that you were just trying to protect our child from danger. And for that I want to thank you. That was very brave.”

The kid, whose name she still didn't know, looked still tense and suspicious and a little hopeless, but in the end he seemed to believe in her sincerity. It wasn't fake. Kate had just lost years of her life, but based on the information that he'd had at his disposal at the time, this boy had done nothing wrong.

During the next minute she managed to get him to relax again – at least enough to take care of the cuts on his hand. She also got off one more layer of clothing, which sufficed to determine that he probably didn't have any more injuries that needed immediate attention. The topic of bathing was another issue. He wasn't entirely unfamiliar with the concept, as the machines kept up a minimum of hygiene in their camps, but he was obviously uncomfortable with the idea of getting naked for it. Kate wondered how he ever got through the process in the camp, where there were dozens of people with him rather than just one, and he _knew_ some of them were willing to hurt him rather than just suspecting it.

It was probably the unfamilliartiy of it, she guessed. In that place he knew where he could run and hide. Here, everything was new and uncertain.

Eventually, she found something that might work when she asked him if he'd be more comfortable if she left him alone for a moment to try and get clean. While he still didn't want to talk to her, he seemed okay with that. Before she left the room, Kate asked him to try the temperature of the water in the tub and tell her if it was okay and was rewarded with the face of a kid who quite possible encountered hot water for the first time in his life.

She left the door open the barest of cracks – not enough to see anything, but enough to hear if anything needed her attention in there. The idea of leaving a patient with fresh bandages and a possibly unstable mental condition alone with a tub full of water didn't sit well with her, but it appeared to be the only way to get him clean, and once he was done with this examination, he would be alone anyway, if he really wanted to be.

The advantage of leaving the room was that she had a chance to grab her dear husband and rip him a new one. She got that chance because he lingered close to the room, and because the waiting area was deserted at the moment. Then she didn't get the chance because John started the conversation with an apology on his part, about how he'd seen Jack outside and ought to have checked that Kate was really alone in that room rather than assume that she was.

Kate glared at him, because yes, that had been a stupid thing to do, and with potentially fatal consequences, but also because now yelling at him was out.

Or hissing at him. Hearing yelling through that door probably wouldn't do that kid in there any favors.

“How's he?” she finally said, nodding at the baby fisting John's jacket and gurgling. She wasn't trying to sound kind. She wanted him to remember that his carelessness could easily have endangered their son.

“Cranky,” John replied. “Tired and confused by the commotion, I suppose.” He nodded at the mostly closed door; both of them were keeping their voices down. “How's _he_?”

“ _He_ was just trying to protect himself and the baby. He thought you were a threat.”

“I get that.” Sometimes Kate forgot that despite not dealing much with people who weren't carrying firearms, her husband was not, in fact, blind. “He was bleeding when I left.”

Nor was he unkind. “He'll be fine,” Kate assured him. “Didn't even blink when I sewed his cuts. Tough little guy.”

To her surprise, John chuckled softly. “I believe it. I met a kid in the middle of battle today and I think it was him. I tried to help him and he bit me.” He shifted the baby to show her his hand, where teeth had left a clear mark on his skin.

Kate tried to get a better look, because bites from humans where nothing to take lightly, but John pulled the hand back. “It's not bad,” he promised, unknowingly echoing the kid's words from earlier – the only ones he had spoken so far. “Getting bitten in the hand seems to be a family tradition,” he added, which no doubt indicated another story about his mother. He didn't tell it, though, but asked, “Did you get a name out of him?”

“No. He hasn't spoken much. It'll try again after he got a chance to relax a little.” Again, she underlined her words with a glare, but this time John ignored her.

“How come our son is with you?” he wanted to know.

“He's here because the person who was supposed to watch him is too busy hanging out at the barracks to babysit her little brother.” Kate's voice turned icy. She was very, very angry.

John's face clouded. “I'll talk to her,” he promised.

“No. _I_ will talk to her.” Kate forced her anger down and listened for the quiet splashing of water from the room next door. “But first I have to finish here. Take the baby, will you? Where ever you need to be, it can't be worse than here.”

“Right,” John agreed. “I'll try to not to get into any other fight with anyone under the age of ten or eleven for the rest of the day.”

“I think he's actually older than that. It's hard to guess, but he might be as old as thirteen or fourteen.”

A shadow fell over John's face. That was odd – Kate would have thought that the idea the kid might be older than he looked would be a bit of a relief, considering where they found him. “Are you sure?”

“Not until I ask him. If he even knows. But they often look younger than they are, especially under all that grime.” This reminded her once again that John didn't really deal much with the kids they got out of the camps. Few of them made it into the army due to their severe problems with working with others. Even Kate didn't see many of them again after her initial check up. Not few of them escaped out into the open fields at the first opportunity. With their survival instincts and ruthlessness, they actually might have a chance out there on their own, she sometimes consoled herself, and tried not to think about the possibility of them being captured by the machines again, being send to another camp, again. Mostly, for the sake of her sanity, she tried not to think about them at all.

Except, of course, when they were right in front of her. As promised, she knocked on the door before entering the room again, and other than John she waited long enough to give the boy time to react. He didn't call her in, but she hadn't thought he would. After about ten seconds she opened the door to find him out of the tub and just pulling over the t-shirt she had held ready for him. He was also rearing his newly provided pair of worn but clean jeans, held up by a length of rope serving as a belt, and his old shoes. The sweater and jacked were still off, so Kate had a chance to check out both his arms now, and his neck down to his collarbones. There were scratches and old scars, some livid bruises, but nothing that needed her attention, it seemed. Getting a look on his torso would have been great, but that just wouldn't happen, she could tell. Getting this far was amazing enough,

Perhaps there was hope for this one.

Before she had left she was wrapped foil around the bandaged and already cleaned area around his wound to keep it dry, and currently he was unwrapping that with surprising care, as if he were afraid to break it.

While his task was pointless, she didn't interrupt him but made use of the opportunity to take in his appearance. His hair was wet now, and revealed to be a dark blond, but it was still a tangled mess, dripping water onto his shirt. There was no hope of ever untangling that.

“Hey,” she said softly, stepping up to him while making sure to stay in his line of sight. “May I?” She gestured to his hair, and he nodded after a second, confused and wary. Kate trailed her fingers only lightly over the tangled stands that fell way past his shoulders. “I don't think anyone will ever be able to untangle this,” she said. “Do you mind I I cut it off?”

The head shaking she got in return looked surprisingly eager. For all she knew the inmates of the camps were not given the means to take care of such matters themselves and he was glad to get rid of it.

Making sure to always let him know what she was doing, Kate took a pair of scissors out of a box that was stored beneath the desk and locked just in case. She didn't really aim to get a good haircut done, just to get the worst of the mess off, and in the end, he was left with short hair just past his ears that stuck up in all directions but had a chance to actually be tamed by a hairbrush. If he ever used one. At least it was manageable now, and when the boy ran his hand through his now short hair, she could imagine that it felt much better, too.

Eventually he turned around, looked at her, and finally spoke. “What's the baby's name?” he asked her with his hoarse, ageless voice. It wasn't quite what Kate had expected.

“It's Casey,” she told him. “He'll be six month old next week.” This seemed like a good opportunity to gather some information for the card she'd have to fill out. “Do you know how old you are?”

The kid thought for a moment, a look of concentration on his face. “What year is it?”

Kate kept her face carefully blank. “2020,” she said. “You remember when you were born?”

“In 2007. I think.” He thought hard again. Certainly this was not something that had mattered to him for many years. “I was almost five in 2012, in winter. Early winter. Like now.”

So he was almost thirteen now. That was a closer estimate than Kate had dared hope to get. It was October now, so his birthday was probably in November or early December. “What happened in 2012?” she tried, wondering why that was significant enough for him to remember.

He shrugged, looked somewhere else. His face was blank, too. “It's the first thing I remember,” he said vaguely. “I lost my parents, and then the machines found me. I know that I was almost five. I think my mom mentioned it?” The last bit was a question – he clearly didn't really recall any details. Kate couldn't answer it for him. All she could do was look away before her feelings showed too clearly on her face. She didn't often regret that she wasn't there when the camps got freed and all the machines were blown apart, but right now it would have felt so good.

“That's very young,” she eventually said carefully. “How did you survive?”

He shrugged again. “I hid.” And she could tell that he wasn't really willing to elaborate on that.

She wasn't even sure she _wanted_ to know more than that. Best to change the topic. “What's your name?” she tried again, now that he was actually talking to her. As hoped, this time she got an answer out of him. She learned that his name was Kyle, but his family name he didn't know. Kate made a mark on her chart – once everyone was accounted for, he and anyone else without a last name would be assigned one.

There was a lot more she would have liked to asked or check, but while he had opened up some, she could tell that he was reaching the end of what he could deal with rather quickly. Best to leave him alone for a while, and hope that she would actually see him again later.

Of course, “alone” was not a very specific definition here. Kate wouldn't bother him anymore, but she'd release him out to the other helpers who would lead him to the halls where the former prisoners were waiting until the organizational phase was over and everyone had to decide what they wanted to do now. He would get blankets and food and the option to rest, but he wouldn't get any privacy. It was simply not something the bunkers could offer.

What they could and did offer were soldiers who officially were there to provide help and information if required but also kept an eye out on things and stepped in if fights broke out or anyone got attacked. So the kid – Kyle – would be safe now. Kate just doubted he would understand that for quite some time.

  


-

  


As much as being saddled with the baby rained on John's parade, it did have the advantage of giving him an excuse to retreat to his office for a while. Eventually. After checking up on the wounded soldiers being treated in another part of the base, and getting some information on how the new arrivals were handing the situation.

The “office” was a room the size of a walk-in closet, with a metal table, a lamp, and a bedroll on the floor where John, Kate, or Jeanette could sleep one at a time. The assumption was that they wouldn't all get the chance for rest at the same time anyway, which so far had been true.

John had spend only one night here before the attack, anyway, and that night had not involved any sleep. He'd rested some later, but right now his limps felt like lead and his infant son seemed to weigh a ton.

He sat down on the single chair, balancing Casey on his thigh, while eying the bedroll with a scowl. Jeanette probably wouldn't show up anytime soon, but when she did, she was in for a world of trouble. Knowing this, she'd probably stay out of the way until John and his unit had moved out of here. Either way, whatever he said to her would fall on deaf ears anyway, on account on him being the one saying it.

Fortunately, Kate wanted to take over this one. John was just too happy to let her.

The bedroll beckoned, but he knew he couldn't give it it its call. Even here, work still called. He had told everyone where he was and left the door open so they could come to him if there was anything they needed, and even though he knew that unless there was an emergency they probably wouldn't, he still had plenty to do besides. This room didn't contain any sensitive documents, so it wasn't locked, and someone had gotten here before him to dump an entire pile of papers onto the desk.

Running this army was not like running a company, especially since they didn't have to deal with taxes, but some paperwork still came up. It was purely informational in nature, however. Keeping stock of provisions and ammunition, providing an overview of who many had joined them and how many had died, a record of the various bases, reports on missions, on machine movements... it piled up, but this pile in front of John was only related to the mission they had just returned from – that they were technically still on until they all had left this territory and returned to their safer base. John pushed down his fatigue and decided to get started, as this was stuff he had to look at sooner or later anyway.

Except for some documents he just _wanted_ to look at.

He sorted through the papers and found the list with the names and data of the newly freed inmates close to the bottom. Precious seconds were wasted while he just stared at it, then he started to actually read, for the moment only interested the names.

There was no typed and printed list yet. The handwriting of the people who had made these notes was of varying quality, but John could still tell in one glance if the name he was looking for was there or not. He reached the end of the stack – a satisfyingly thick stack that had taken up the better part of the pile – without finding it, and was left feeling something like relief and loss, and with only the sheet left to look at: the one that contained the names of those assigned a new family name from their list.

He flipped it over, scanned it. There were six, this time, starting at _P_ :

_Patterson, Jeanine, age 15_

_Quinn, Anton, age 12_ – Here, John managed a small smile, even though the kid would probably never know why his name was awesome.

_Reese, Kyle, age 12_

And there it was.

John had to set the papers down for a moment, as if they were too heavy to hold up. He had expected this, he thought. Why couldn't he just take it in stride?

Because this was a moment he had awaited, longed for, and dreaded his entire life, probably.

Eventually, he flipped through the next sheets until he found the one that held Reese's information from the check-up earlier today. They were written in Kate's neat but hurried hand, so she was the doctor he had ended up with. The information passed through John's numb mind without touching on anything. The patient's name was Kyle, he read, family name unknown. No known living family ( _Yes,_ John thought. _There's me. There's Jeannie and Lou and Casey_. But the thoughts drifted like nightly wanderers through him, leaving no traces.) Born approximately in November 2007. Minor injuries from the fight, no complete check-up possible but no indication of hidden wounds. Malnourished, of course.

Underneath the pre-printed lines the small, scribbled words _In camp since 2012???_

John stared at them. _Mom_ , he thought.

He put the papers down. Covering his face with one hand, he pulled the sleepy baby on his lap closer with the other, suddenly ridiculously grateful for this son's presence and the absence of anyone old enough to ask questions.

He sat like that for what felt like hours and seconds, until someone knocked on his door to inform him about the latest problem that had to be solved.

  



	17. 2020 - 3/3

It was another half day before John made it back to his room. He was so exhausted, physically and emotionally, that he barely spared a thought to wonder why the soldier stationed at the opening of the short corridor that led to it looked so awkward. He remembered that expression when he neared the door – closed but not heavy enough to keep out much sound – and head voices inside. Kate was talking, and from the calm and strained quality of her voice he could tell that the yelling was already over.

That explained the guard. Sound carried through these halls.

He stopped outside the room, not wanting to interrupt the conversation going on in there. Although it wasn't much of a conversation, and more of a monologue Kate made in the direction of her daughter. At some point she stopped, obviously expecting Jeannie to say something in return, but only silence followed.

“I don't have time for this, Jeanette, I really don't. I am too tired, and half of that is on you.” Another brief pause followed Kate's words, then she added, “Not only did I have to keep an eye on Casey all day, on top of a fucking buckload of work, I also lost years of my life because of him. And you know why? Because I had to have him in the examination room with me and one of the patients grabbed him and tried to run off with him. And all that wouldn't have happened if you had been there to watch him like you were supposed to!” Her voice got sharper at the end, as her anger reawakened. John had the impression that his wife hadn't actually planned to reveal this bit to their daughter, but had reached the point where she thought it needed to be said to get through to her.

“I- I didn't think-” Jeanette finally stammered. It sounded like she had been crying. Then she apparently decided that attack was the best defense. “Why would you even take him with you? You knew it was dangerous here. You only took him so you could make me stay in the room all the time!”

“Honey, if we didn't need you to watch him, we wouldn't have taken you at all! You'd have stayed at the base with Lou. We only took Casey because he still needs his mother and we thought that we could rely on you to help us here. And I am very, very disappointed to find that we couldn't.”

John winched. Kate was pulling out the heavy guns now. He agreed, but it did show how angry she was. The incident in her examination room earlier today probably hadn't done anything to improve her mood.

Jeanette mumbled something that John couldn't make out. Apparently, neither could Kate. “What was that?” she asked, her voice dangerously calm.

It damn better had been an apology.

“I said, what do you expect?” Jeanette snapped. “I'm elven! I should be out there fighting already. I have to show them somehow that I _want_ to, that I'm not afraid, that it's just _you_ who won't let me go!” She sounded close to tears again. “Everyone's talking about me!”

“No one's talking about you, except the ones you talked to about it first,” Kate shut down the argument. “And do you think they'll stop talking now, when they see that you can't even follow the simplest of orders? Do you really think they will feel safer with you around knowing you are unreliable?”

“That's got nothing to do with it!” Jeanette was almost yelling now. (John wondered where the baby was – he had handed it back to Kate hours ago, after she was done with the health checks and registration.) “I would be a good soldier! I can fight, I am not afraid. This is just you, and _Da_ _d_ -” The last word she spat out like a curse.

“Yes,” said Kate. “Your father, who is also the General of the army you want to join. And if you do, you will have to follow his orders, you will have to do what he says, without question or argument or stomping your feet when you don't like something. And that's the reason why we won't let you join: Because you can't do that yet. Every day you keep letting your petty resentments get in the way you prove to us that we're right.”

“That's his fault,” Jeannie snapped. “He would have let Chrissy burn to death!”

“Yes, he would have. Because he had to. Just like you will have to when you're a soldier. As long as you can't accept that, you can't be one. You'd just be a danger to yourself and others.” There was silence again, for a heartbeat. Then Kate said, a lot softer, “Did you really think bravery would be enough?”

Again, Jeanette's reply was mumbled, but this time John could make out her words: “I hate you.”

“That's alright,” Kate retorted, entirely unimpressed. “You're eleven. Every elven-years-old is entitled to hate their parents.”

If Jeannie said anything else after that, John didn't hear it. He barely had time to step aside and flatten against the wall before the door was thrown open and his daughter stormed out, slamming the door after her. Miraculously, she didn't see him standing there in the dark corner, but from the look on her face he supposed that she didn't see much of anything at all.

He waited a moment until she was gone, then he opened the door and carefully stepped in, trying to assess his chances to not get murdered by his wife. It would have made an already terrible day even worse.

But Kate was not in a murdering mood. She was sitting on the chair, her elbows on her knees and her fingers buried in her short red hair, the contrast to the vibrant color always making her unnaturally pale skin seem even paler. When she looked up and saw John, she stood without a word and threw her arms around his neck. She wasn't crying, but John could tell that she was nearing the end of her rope, and he pulled her close, suddenly overcome by his own need for physical comfort. A million words on his tongue that he wasn't allowed to say.

When Kate pulled back, she did it with a sigh. “Good news,” she said. “Our daughter hates both of us now.”

“Great. I always felt there weren't enough things we did together,” John joked. It sounded lame even to his own ears, but Kate boxed him in the shoulder anyway, which meant she at least appreciated the attempt. But she sobered up pretty quickly.

“She's acing like a child,” she said. “Thinking she knows what she's doing and throwing a tantrum when she doesn't get her will. Because she _is_ a child. And yet she's right: if she got the join the army, she wouldn't even be the youngest.” She looked John in the face, her lips pressed into a bitter line. “Children like that are people we send into battle.”

John shook his head, sadly. “There are no children in this world,” he pointed out. But that wasn't true, and they both knew it. Jeanette was a child, and Lou was one, because they had tried very hard to let them have as much of childhood as was possible under the circumstances, and because they could shelter them much better than most other parents could.

He wondered if that would get them killed one day. If maybe their parents ought not to have tried so hard to protect them. But the idea not to seemed too absurd to contemplate.

“Where's Casey?” he asked, tired.

“With Giselle. It's easier now that we can work in shifts again, but I still have to go pick him up in a moment. I just wanted him out of the way while I yelled at his sister.”

“I think you traumatized our guard,” John told her, thinking about the soldier on duty in the corridor. Kate blushed faintly, but then scowled.

“That's what he gets for listening in on other people's conversations.”

“You probably made it very hard for him not to.” John sighed. He was trying to keep things light, but right now it was too exhausting. “How's Casey doing? Any lasting damage?” he asked, thinking about the incident he had accidentally caused hours ago.

“Sleeping like an angel when I left him. I don't even think he was ever all that frightened to begin with, just cranky about being woken.”

“Really? That's good.” John hadn't even thought that Casey had been all that traumatized by the event. He knew how his son acted when he was really scared, and in this case he had acted like a sleepy baby that had been dropped into an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar people and was just done with all the bullshit. “How's that kid? You ever got his name?” He supposed she had to, since there had been no form willed out with “XXX” for the first name.

Kate nodded. “It's Kyle,” she said, bending down to pick up her bag that had been dropped to the floor beside the desk. “And he's been in that place way too long.” She looked like she wanted to say more but stopped when she turned around and saw the look on her husband's face. “What' wrong?” she asked, concerned.

John just stared at her. For a far too many seconds he had no control over his voice, or expression, at all. ' _I should have known this,_ ' he though numbly, distantly. Trying to evoke memories of the scene in the examination room, of the scrawny, dirty, bleeding kid holding his baby, yet at the same time trying not to. Kate was staring back at him. He had to empty his thoughts.

“Nothing,” he said. “I'm sorry. I need to sit down.” He actually needed to. And the chair was right there. He sat.

“Are you okay?” Kate's hand was on his forehead now, checking for fever. (John didn't get to have her attention like this often; under different circumstances he would have enjoyed it.) “Did you eat something today?”

“No,” he admitted. It wasn't wrong. He'd forgotten. “I guess I just need some fuel.” His voice sounded monotonous, like a robot. He tried to force some life into it. “I'm fine, Kate. I just need a break for five minutes.”

She looked doubtful, but eventually let him convince her to go pick up Casey before Giselle had to take him to her shift in medical, possibly provoking another incident like earlier. When she came back John would be gone. He needed a moment for himself, a moment to _think_.

But she left and he stayed where he was when he realized that there was no space for him to be alone anywhere around here. He would have ten minutes now, before his wife came back. Maybe fifteen. Fifteen minutes to deal with the fact that he had just met his father for the first time in his life, that he now had a face and was a real person, and that so far John had failed utterly and catastrophically in his plans to make his life even the slightest bit less horrible.

  


-

  


In the end John had twenty minutes that day, but twenty minutes still weren't enough. It was too much to take in, and at the same time his thoughts refused to focus. He'd had so many years to prepare for this moment – he'd thought he'd know what to do, what to think, how to take it. He didn't. There was no one he could talk to about it. There was no precedence for his situation in history.

He wanted to go and seek out the boy who would father him so many years in the future (Not all that many years – just nine, at best, which was a lot when it came to the duration of the war but not when it counted the remainder of a life.), yet at the same time he dreaded it. In the end it wasn't until the next day that he made it to the halls where the former inmates were waiting for life to take them one way or another, and even then he only dared a glance from the distance.

This bunker was small, much too small for so many people. And not very safe. Skynet was already looking for them – several divisions were out there in the ruins right now, laying fake tracks and engaging the machines in battle. They would have to leave a soon as they possibly could, but they wouldn't all be able to leave at once, or in the same direction. John would stay here until they closed this temporary base, but the first groups would take off as early as tomorrow. It would create some room to breathe for everyone else.

Already there had been incidents. Former inmates had attacked each other over food or clothes, not getting that there would be (just) enough for everyone, nor that the fact that no machines were around to shoot them for fighting anymore didn't mean that this kind of behavior was tolerated here. There had been at least one murder, and beside the fact that they had to deal with the murderer, that was just fucking tragic for the victim – to make it this far and then get killed the moment they were supposed to be safe.

Safety was an illusion here. Even later, when anyone who hadn't signed up to fight with them was relocated back behind the lines that marked enemy territory, no one would be truly be safe until the war was over.

Nine years. Nine years until these people would know what it meant not to be afraid.

Some of them, anyway.

Right now, things were tense. The freed prisoners and the soldiers and civilian helpers who were supposed to support them came from very different worlds, and the longer anyone had been in those camps the harder it was for them to accept the rules of this one. The soldiers didn't always understand the kind of trauma they were dealing with. They clashed, and the people from the camp clashed with each other, and over all of that lay the tension that came with the knowledge that the machines could attack at any moment. Stepping into the crowded halls for the first time, John felt like they were sitting on a powder keg in the middle of a thunderstorm. They needed to get people out of here, separate them, and give everyone room to think before they reacted, or else things would explode.

It hadn't been this bad when they freed the previous camps. The circumstances had been different, and there had never been this many people. And somewhere in all that chaos and potential disaster was John's father – a fragile child who had never known anything other than the harsh reality between the fences and was probably as overwhelmed and lost in this place as he would once be in pre-war Los Angeles.

And John should probably try to help him. For all he knew the boy (and wasn't it strange, even now, to think of him like that?) didn't have anyone else right now. Which in the end meant that he didn't have _anyone_ at all, because John didn't know what to do. Even looking at him from a distance took an effort of will, and when he tried, he didn't know where to find him, and once he was inside the hall he couldn't focus on Reese anymore anyway, just like he could never focus on anything regarding his family, because ten thousand people came to him with ten thousand problems, and he was expected to solve all of them.

And that was his job. He couldn't say no. Nor could he turn back time and come back here again wearing a disguise. People recognized him – the soldiers, but some of the former inmates as well. Everyone suddenly seemed to be staring at him, either trying to assess how much he was truly worth or expecting him to start walking on air. John hated it. He had never hated it as much as he did this moment.

But there was no turning back now. He had the attention of all these people and they wanted his. This was the time to say something. John hadn't prepared anything, but he didn't need to. He was good at this. He just hated it sometimes.

Like now, when he was going to turn to a bunch of people who had just escaped hell and ask them to jump right back into it. He didn't start with that, though. He stepped onto one of the large wooden boxes that held spare blankets so that everyone could see him and started with the attack on their base that had kept them from coming for these people two years earlier.

He expressed his regret that it took them so long, not lingering on the subject however, knowing that no one who hadn't been there would ever be able to understand what those two years meant for these people. He assured them that they would be taken care of now, that there was enough food for everyone, and that instead of the protein sludge they had gotten at the camp there were delicacies here like roasted rat and twenty-five years old conserves. (This even got some subdued laughter from some of the older ones.) Finally he commented on their strength that had let them hold on for so long and expressed his gratitude for their help in the attack.

He did not mention the soldiers who had died for them, nor did he mention that they had saved them on the expense of people in other camps. This was not the time to appeal to anyone's sense of guilt or obligation. He did, however, mention that the war was still going on, that the machines that had enslaved them for so long would not be defeated without everyone who was able to fighting against them, and that their final victory would be hard won, but it would happen, and they would, if these brave and resourceful people were with them, grind those metal motherfuckers into dust. So maybe he was appealing to their sense of vengeance.

Even while he was talking he was taking in the scene in front of him. He had come to the biggest of the halls that contained the new ones, a long, narrow room with a high ceiling held up by metal pillars. Bedrolls and blankets had been placed on the ground, leaving little room for walking between them without stepping on anything. Each person had one of those to sleep on, plus another blanket as a cover. The original idea had been provide an empty box for every place where people could place their personal belongings – even if it was just the water bottle they had been handed when they came in – but helpers who had once been inmates themselves, of another camp, had advised against that. It would only have caused fights.

There was no privacy, and while the camp hadn't offered any of that in it's sleeping area either, John knew that this was particularly hard on the younger ones who were used to hiding and couldn't possibly understand that there were people around who would protect them now. Already he had received reports of kids disappearing into the tunnels, some never to be seen again. This base didn't offer many places to hide and no pipes to big enough to crawl into so John could only guess that they had somehow escaped outside. It made him sad, because they would have been safer here. It also worried him. He looked over the shadowy hall now, tried to take in as much as he could without really focusing on it, without letting it distract him from the words he was saying. He hadn't come here to speak. He hadn't come to be seen.

There were still a couple of half-growns left in the crowd. Among them a boy with unevenly-cut sandy-blonde hair somewhere halfway into the room and half-hidden by shadow. Too far away to make out details, but John saw the white bandage wrapped around the kid's hand and the way he knelt on his blanket, listening to every word John was saying, and the way his good hand was clutching the blanket as if he couldn't wait to go out and finally fight the machines like John Connor was asking him to.

When he noticed John looking at him, he ducked away as if trying to hide. Did he recognize him from earlier? He probably did. The kid looked somewhat ashamed, and somewhat anxious, as if he feared that because of that incident he wouldn't be allowed to go and get himself killed fighting in John's war.

John hated himself. But he didn't think. His own personal feelings had never mattered.

When he was done talking and had climbed off his box, some people came to him, to talk to him in person. Some were angry. Most were almost reverent. John resisted the urge to pretend having to be elsewhere. It was important to stay approachable, to not become a distant figure above them all who send them into battle and wasn't part of their lives. It was hard. But he listened. He answered. He gave these people the attention they deserved. The boy with the bandage did not come forth, and for that John was grateful.

It wasn't until much later that he got a chance to sneak away, to sneak back unseen while everyone else was busy with something else. He had seconds, lingering in the shadows at the side of the room. All he caught was a brief impression of the boy, now sitting with his back to the wall and his knees drawn to this chest, his attention focused on the room in front of him and everyone in it, watching, tense. But not running.

Now that John got a good, if brief look at him, knowing who he was, he couldn't believe he hadn't recognized earlier that this boy was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, his father. He looked nothing like John, but he looked everything like the man he had seen in the age-old mugshot from 1984. Reese had an easily recognizable face, and John recognized it now, in this boy who was sitting alone and mistrustful in the midst of this crowd, waiting for this chance to die in battle.

He never noticed John watching him, and John crept away before he could. This trip had accomplished nothing. The dread was still there. He still didn't have time to sit down and deal with this. There was no closure, no clear path for him to take. Only more guilt.

  


-

  


The worst part was the uncertainty. John had spend his life fearing the moment he would actually meet Reese, but at the same time he had somehow thought that once he had, things would become clearer, slide into place, just play themselves out without him having to do anything more than watch. He hadn't even been aware of that until now when it hadn't happened.

He had also hoped, so desperately, that no matter how bleak the childhood described by Reese to John's mother had sounded, it hadn't been all that bad. That he'd known something like safety though it, that he'd had his family and as much freedom as this world could give. He'd hoped so for his mother, whose heart was already broken for the guy, but also for himself – as if that would somehow easy the guilt. As if it would make the sacrifice he'd ask of the man later easier to bear.

Now he found that, yes, it would have. He knew, because this was worse than he had ever imagined. Because now he knew that the only hope Reese had to ever know something like peace and happiness would by by living to see the end of the war, and John would take that from him.

John felt like he had failed. He should have tried harder. He had promised his mother that he would find Reese and spare him exactly he life he'd had, and then he hadn't done anything. Hadn't known how. She had asked the impossible and yet he should have done it, somehow. He was John Connor. The impossible was what everyone expected of him.

And from now on it wouldn't get better. Reese would join the army, would spend the next nine years fighting and amassing scars, and then he would leave for the past and die. The hopelessness of it all was nearly crippling. John spend what he called the night – the few hours he got for himself to sleep – staring up at the ceiling. Dreading the future that he couldn't influence, while feeling like there was something he could and ought to do and wasn't doing. It was the dread of actually meeting Reese face to face, he found eventually. The idea horrified him. It wasn't just guilt – it was also the fact that John knew the future, and the fact that he knew that one day this kid would be his father that made it impossible to meet him at any sort of normal level.

Somewhere deep down inside of John was still the boy who had spend his life longing for some kind of father figure; who had imagined how his life would have been if his father had lived, and now he had finally met him and he was twelve years old.

John felt robbed. That was it. He had always known it would be like this, and yet, he felt like the universe had cheated him out of something special.

None of that was, of course, Reese's fault. If anything, the guy had been screwed over by fate even more than John had – and there, he finally admitted, was the error in his thinking. The part he ran away from. It wasn't fate. There was no higher power that forced them to follow some invisible lead. Their futures were predetermined, but it was _John_ who had determined them. Who was going to screw this kid over. He had spend his entire life being punished for something he hadn't done yet, and yet there was no way around the fact that he would do it, and the curse he had always felt lay on him and his family was of his own making.

(It was like something out of a fantasy novel. _“You have done the forbidden deed. Now you shall be curse_ _d_ _, and your family shall be cursed for seven generations, future and past.”_ )

It was unfair to blame even the smallest bit of this dilemma on Reese. And John didn't. But Reese was, inevitably, at the center of it all and that made him hard to face. Which in turn was like pushing him for John's sins, the ones he tried to avoid facing by avoiding Reese, because John _could_ do something to help him even a little bit. And once he had realized that and accepted it, it would no longer leave him alone until he had made he decision that was, after all, the only one he could make.

Where just the thought of facing the kid filled him with dread, the plan that was working its way into his mind filled him with horror. But once again his own feelings didn't matter. And this time that wasn't because he had to do what was best for everyone and live up to the role he was playing, but because he was owing a depth.

He had always wished he could make Reese's life even that little bit better, and now that he had thought of a way that he could, there was no excuse, _none_ whatsoever, for not doing it.

But the downsides. They made him hesitate still, well into the next day, weighing his options, the good and the bad points against each other.

The basic solution was obvious: Instead of just sending Reese on to spend the next six or seven years on battlefields, until he would be reassigned to John's unit in 2027 and spend two more years on battlefields, he could just take the kid in with his family. He was young enough (literally young enough to be John's son, just eighteen months older than his daughter), and while that wouldn't keep him safe forever, nor would it probably keep him from becoming a soldier for very long, it would offer him, if nothing else, a place to belong and a family who might grow to love him.

But that, right there, was the problem; and it wouldn't only be _his_ problem. Even the idea of talking to Reese seemed to put a block between his will and his body, paralyzing him. The idea of actually getting to know him was horrifying. Bad enough to send a stranger to die for him. How much worse it would be with someone he had seen grow up and allowed himself to love. But it wasn't just John who would have to suffer the fallout of that one day, but Kate and their children as well. Much more than the sheer absurdity of the situation, this was what made John hesitate. And even when he tried to blind out his own feelings about it and the selfish fear that his wife and children would never forgive him when it was over, the simple fact remained that he simply didn't want to put them through that.

But was that really an excuse he could use? John had this one chance to pay Reese back even a little for what he owned him, offer something else than pain, death, and violence, so did he truly have any right to deny him that on the ground that it would cause John and his family some inconvenience down the line?

He was fairly sure he knew what his mother would have to say about that.

It was this thought that pushed the decision for him, halfway through the next day. He owed his mother, too, and he had made her a promise.

He'd bring the subject up with Kate at the first opportunity he got. She'd be surprised, to say the least; after all, there was a distinct possibility that the kid, with his history, wasn't exactly stable, and their family already had enough issues as it was. But maybe this would keep Jeannie busy for a while. And it might cause other people to take in difficult homeless children from the camps as well, with the Connors leading by example. He would be able to sell it to her. He just had to do it quickly.

As much as the prospect of what he was about to do frightened him, once the decision had been made, he felt like a weight had been lifted off him. He was no longer struggling with what to do, he just had to see it through now. For the next nine years.

And beyond. John wasn't naive enough to believe that if he did this, the guilt and pain would end once Reese was gone. Or maybe he would? It could be, after all, that the man he'd grow into would turn out to be the huge disappointment John had always known he had a potential of being. And John would have to see that all the time, knowing that this guy wasn't worthy of his mother's undying love, didn't live up to the expectations John had had in him as a child. Maybe he would be happy to see him go, then. Wouldn't that be convenient, he thought bitterly as he walked towards medical where he would wait – patiently, outside the door – until Kate had a moment for him.

According to what Reese had said in the police interrogation room in 1984, he wouldn't be assigned to John's division until 2027. Maybe there had been a reason for that.

But all that was pure speculation, and if nothing else it was unfair and cruel to put all that on a child. No, this would be John's burden to bear, and he would bear it alone. Just like he would bear the anger of his family when they learned what he had done.

Something to deal with later. As so many things on John's life. Sometimes he spared himself half a moment to imagine the hell his life would be when “later” finally came.

He had way too much time to think again, because Kate was busy and he had to wait. Maybe he should go and just take care of everything, make sure the kid wasn't among the first people to leave the bunker in the course of this day, but he didn't want to do anything without consulting Kate first, didn't want to give her a reason to resent the boy for some irrational reason, even though she was not in the habit of bringing her anger at John down on anyone but John. He had finally worked himself into enough of a paranoia to go and do it anyway when the door opened and Kate called him in.

The thought came to him that she had let him wait on purpose to punish him for the day before, but that would have been not only childish but also irresponsible in the face of the fact that they were all very busy and every minute counted. Beside all the organizational things he was being asked to give his input to, there were all the soldiers out in the field right now, trying to keep the machines occupied. Right this moment, instead of here, John ought to be in communications, getting their reports and coordinating their actions. They were not incompetent without him, but that was his job. He was letting his family matters get in the way of his duties to the army and all the people he was leading and that was something he had sworn a long, long, long time ago he would never do.

This was a matter that couldn't wait and still he felt like he was betraying his duty.

When Kate finally opened the door and called him in, her hands were bloody. “Things must indeed be dire,” she said tiredly as she wiped them off with a cloth, “if you grand me the honor of your presence twice in as many days.”

John let the comment slide. “What happened?” he asked. Kate and her team were here to check the general health of their guests and to tend to any issues that may come up. They were also here to care for those injured in the fight, but those had all been taken care of already. No soldiers had come back from their missions outside yet, let alone injured, so the massive amount of blood was a bit of a surprise.

“Fight between the people from the camp. Escalated quickly.” Kate sighed. “Apparently someone got a knife hidden in their clothes, or something. Another broke a chair and used the leg as a weapon. I don't know. You'd need to ask the soldiers who broke them up.”

No one but the soldiers were allowed to carry any sort of weapon in the bunker, not right now, and everyone had been checked. But these were people who had survived for years under constant observation by killer machines. They were resourceful.

“How bad did it get?”

“Three dead, as of five minutes ago.” That explained the blood. Kate sighed. “They were really going at each other. And no one even knows for sure how it started. What as waste.”

What a waste, indeed. “Were any kids involved in that?”

“One teenager. She got away with a black eye and a shallow cut. Thing is, Private Louise is almost certain that she killed one of the others, but no one can tell for sure.”

“Great.” They'd had to deal with that. Not just with this incident but with the entire situation. It wasn't the first time they went through this, but it always was a challenge, and their success was hard to measure. The people who were killing each other here were traumatized and shaped by terrible experiences, but despite all the sympathy for them, John and Kate and their men still had to make them understand that there were rules to be followed here, just as there had been rules in the camp, and while the rules were different, breaking them would not be tolerated. Maybe it would be asking for too much to expect these people to have an awful lot of compassion and sympathy for other people, but they had to understand that keeping to a basic set of guidelines in their behavior was for their benefit as well, and if they couldn't do that, they couldn't stay. Living like this, in crowds under the earth and deprived of privacy, their rules were pretty instrumental in keeping them all from killing each other.

As this incident had shown.

“There are too many people in here,” he eventually mused out loud. There were. It was hard, if not impossible, to reach everyone and appeal to reason in a space this crowded.

“That's what everyone agrees on,” Kate said. “That's why Hernandez and Davis decided to send out the first group this morning already.”

John froze. “They what?”

“We already have places to send some of those people, remember?” Kate reminded him. “The ones who want to join the army but don't have any experience with weapons and battle yet are to be taken to the training grounds in the south-east, and since sending them on their way doesn't need a lot of preparation, we send them on already, to create some breathing space here.”

John closed his eyes for a too-long second. “' _We_ '?”

“Well, I sure didn't protest, since that seemed like a pretty sensible course of action,” she said defiantly. “What the fuck is your problem?”

“Why wasn't I informed about this?” They usually asked him about every single thing that went on. Of course this one time they had to decide matters over his head!

“Since when do we have to ask you about every goddamn thing? You were busy and the decision was obvious. It wasn't even anything shockingly radical. It was you who told everyone where to send the new recruits, after all. We merely moved ahead the departure time by a few hours. What, you wanted to see them off?”

 _'No, I just wanted to grab one of them and keep him safe.'_ Because John had no doubt at all that Reese was among the people who had walked out of here this morning, now firmly beyond his reach.

He knew with certainty that Reese was among the ones that had left. It had been obvious the last time John had seen him that he was eager to enlist, and while many of the camp-kids were ultimately denied joining the army, unless they turned violent within five minutes of their arrival, they usually weren't shorted out for unstable behavior until during or after their training. And somehow John didn't doubt that Reese would make it anyway, and not only because history had said so. Even if he had only their brief encounter in Kate's examination room to base his opinion on he would have come to that conclusion. He'd snatched John's baby and tried to run with it, yes, but he had done so not to hurt anyone but because he'd thought the baby needed protection. (John deliberately avoided thinking about how Reese would have done as a father, since one way or another he wouldn't ever get the chance to be one.)

Maybe John should have known from the beginning, since the universe obviously hated them, and now history was marching on, once again firmly set in its path.

Except that this time, John didn't know if that was true. There had been nothing in the bit of information he had on Sergeant Tech-Com Kyle Reese that said he hadn't been raised by John Connor and his family. It wasn't likely, but it wasn't impossible either. So maybe rather than blaming the immutability of time, John should simply not have wasted so much time coming to a fucking decision.

He could call them back, of course, but that would endanger both the group of new recruits and the base itself. It also would bring up the question of why he had done that, and aside from the unmentionable truth, John didn't have any explanation available. The only thing he could do, at this point, was to let go of his plan and admit defeat.

He did so gracelessly, with a curse and a fist hitting a tabletop. Kate jumped and stared at him, surprised and concerned, and he had nothing to offer her in response. How could he tell her that he had just wasted the last chance to keep a promise he had made as a child, when he'd been young and stupid and had had no idea what he would have to face.

Perhaps he ought to offer her an apology. The words wouldn't leave this throat, though – the only words of regret he could think of right now were directed at his mother, and she would never hear them.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Kate asked, and all John could do was shake his head, and mumble something along the lines of “Nothing. Never mind.”

Kate's face darkened. “Fine,” she said, coolly. “Did you have a reason for coming here other than abusing my table, or did that turn to nothing, too?”

It had. Of course it had. That was exactly what had happened. John wanted to tall her how absurdly perfect her wording was, but all he could do was make a sound that sounded vaguely like a laugh.

“I'm sorry for wasting your time,” he finally said. He opened his mouth to say more, but he couldn't think enough straight thoughts to not say something he would come to regret in one way or another. Better to remain silent. Better to run.

Kate looked both angry (hurt?) and confused, but didn't try to stop him. John would have a normal conversation with her later to make up for this one. (Later, always later. His entire life consisted of postponed moments.) He left now, walking through corridors that were far too short to allow him for any time to think. He'd go and check the list with the names of those who had left today. Just to make sure. Then he would go and take care of other matters, matters he still was able to influence. Maybe he would get the chance to apologize to his mother when he was dead.

And to his father, too. Except he would actually see his father again long before either of them died, and yet, he wouldn't be able to say anything to him. The plain fact of this got more bitter by the second.

Best not to think about it. Best to push it all back to where it had been sleeping for decades. But already he knew, deep inside, that there was no going back now. This would not be over until it was over.

He had reached the command center, or what they called such in this tiny, temporary place. The records were lying on the table, on top of a pile since they weren't very old. John didn't need long to find what he'd been looking for. Yes, Reese was among those who had joined the army at the first opportunity and left this morning. There were about thirty others who had left with him, and a handful of trained soldiers to protect them. More had enlisted, but were already familiar with fighting and would fill in the gabs left in the divisions who had been diminished by this latest fight. Many were still undecided, needing a few days to wrap their heads around their new situation. John hoped they would all decide to fight with them, but at this moment, he couldn't work up the energy to care.

He was actually surprised that he had managed to get this far without being interrupted by someone addressing him with something more important. Maybe he shouldn't have been – he was aware that his thoughts earlier about everyone always coming to him about every little thing had been unfair. His men were quite capable of making their own decisions inside their own area of control, and as much as he hated it, sending the new recruits on for the safety of everyone had been a sensible thing to do that did not need the approval they had every right to assume he would have given anyway. They were not aware of the circumstances, and John could not tell them. He had no right to yell at them, so he didn't.

Irrational as it was, he could not swallow his anger, but he could hide it. He focused on the present, on what was going on around him. There weren't many people around here, but those who were were busy studying plans or talking into their communication units. John listened, tried to gather information from what he heard about what was going on. Kept his face blank and tried to look like a hardened leader and not like a failed son.

Eventually he heard something that needed his attention. At almost exactly the same moment, someone called his name from the opposite direction with a sense of urgency. John didn't sign. He didn't allow himself to feel weary. He went back to work.


	18. 2021 - 1/3

The snow was pristine. Nothing marred it; no dirt, no wheel tracks, no foot prints. It kept falling, covering every trace, every sign that other humans existed in this world. Left or right. Straight ahead? He looked around and couldn't find any clue where to go. The others were out of sight (He had looked away but for a second, hadn't he? Hadn't they been here a moment before?) and he didn't know where to find them. Any path he took might be wrong. Any wrong path would lead him further away and get him more lost. He didn't know this area. He had no way of finding his way back. No one would come looking for him.

After taking a few hesitating steps forward, despair threatened to overcome him. He was lost. Lost. There was _nothing_ around him.

Only one in three options was right, and if he picked the wrong one, he would never, ever find the others. But if he just stayed here, he wouldn't find them either. Staying still was the only option he _knew_ was wrong. So he started moving. Forward. Listening. There was only silence around him. Looking around. The light was fading, the falling snow melting into the night creeping closer. Between the snow and the night, he could make out the dark shapes of structures. Lumps covered by snow. Ruins or natural formations – it didn't matter. He would climb one, hope to see the others while there was something left to be seen.

He moved into the direction of the nearest shape. Moving fast – with every moment he lingered, the others got further away. But the distance to his goal was larger than he had thought and the snow made it hard to move quickly. He was breathing hard, the cold air burning in his lungs and his throat. He was sweating, and that was bad, that meant he might catch a cold, and then he would certainly be killed. But he fought down his instinct to slow down and moved even faster instead, overcome by the need to climb that obstacle and find everyone else. They had to be _somewhere_. They couldn't simply have disappeared.

When he found the structure, it was so dark that he didn't see it coming. He collided with it, hard, and the pain in his shoulder was another reason for fear. He couldn't allow himself to be too damaged. It would get him killed, and the pain would also make it hard to climb this thing. But he did it anyway. The pain was bad but he ignored it. It was just a signal of his body trying to tell him something, but there was nothing he could do about it, so the signal was worthless and could be dismissed. He made it to the top of the structure and found that he was standing on a roof. A flat roof, of a low building, the shape familiar enough to make his heart ache with fear and dread. He wanted to get away from this place; every instinct told him to run, but he stayed and looked around, into the dark that still, somehow, let him see that the snow was untouched in all directions and no other living being moved in this landscape but him.

Hopelessness overcame him. This place seemed to be made out of it. The urge to just sit down and give up began to creep through his body from his feet upwards, keeping him locked in place. Paralyzing him. He fought it and climbed down, the cold numbing the pain in his shoulder while also amplifying it. (What an odd word that was, amplifying. He had only just learned it. What an off thing to remember, here.) He needed to go back the way he came, take another path, hope that he could still catch up with the others. They wouldn't be waiting for him. He had to hurry. But when he reached the ground he couldn't tell which way he'd come from. The snow had eaten all his traces.

Knowing only that he couldn't stay still, he started walking, just away from the building, into the bleak, blank emptiness before him. The snow obscured his view. It was dark, but somehow it was the snow, like a curtain that parted a little more with every step, that was the only thing keeping him from seeing where he needed to go. He walked until he hit a fence, and when he did, the hopelessness turned into panic that made him run, blindly, along the barricade, looking for a gab, a hole, any way to the other side.

Instead, he found a corner. He didn't stop there, even as it kept him from going on in the direction he had chosen, but followed it, followed the fence, looking for a way out. There had to be one – he had walked in here, somehow, he needed to be able to to walk out.

He had to follow the way he had chosen. There was no turning back.

Something was following him.

He kept running, even though he already knew there was no way out. Finally he hit the next corner and kept going. The snow slowed him down and whoever was after him was coming closer, and he _knew_ they were going to get him there was no place to hide he _knew_ –

Someone grabbed his shoulder, and he knew he was lost. There was nowhere to run, no place to hide. But he wouldn't go down without a fight, and he had a gun, he just remembered when his eyes snapped open that he had a gun; he didn't know where he was but he wasn't helpless, and the gun was already in his hand and it was his only way out, his only chance...

  


-

  


The kid's eyes flew open and the very second they did he sat up and raised his gun, in one fluid movement Justin would have approved of for the smooth reflexes it displayed, if it hadn't ended with a loaded weapon aimed at his face. He hadn't seen the gun when when he had gone to shake the boy awake from his nightmares before he could disturb everyone else, otherwise he would have chosen a different approach. One that pinned the kid down – by sitting on him or something. More traumatic, sure, but less risk or brain matter splattered across half the division.

“Calm down, Soldier,” he said – quietly, because he also didn't want half the division to wake up. No one could accuse him of not having his priorities in order.

His unhurried tone had the desired effect. The young soldier – barely a teenager – blinked at him a few time and the tense expression on his face melted into a look of dawning horror as he found his way back to reality and realized what he was doing. The gun was lowered and the safety slid back on. Justin hadn't even noticed it coming off. All the better – no knowing that had really helped him stay calm just now.

Around them, one or two of the others stirred, but even those who woke up just turned around and didn't care. Nightmares were nothing unusual here, and sleep was precious. They had arrived at this base late the day before and everyone was exhausted. It was the first time in weeks they got the chance to sleep in a secure place without constant fear of attack and almost everyone was making use of the opportunity with great efficiency. The room they had been given was large, with rows of narrow cots providing the most comfortable beds Justin and his men had had in months. The cot Justin was facing now was close to the center of the room, beside a metal pillar holding the ceiling. The kid on it sat up straighter while also looking down, at the thin blanket he was clutching in his now weaponless hands.

Still trying to convince himself that whatever horrors he just escaped weren't real, while simultaneously coming to terms with just having fucked up in the real world. Yeah. Contrary to public belief, Justin had been there.

With a sigh, he crouched down in front of the cot. The movement was a mistake, pulling painfully on the old burn scars that ran all the way up his leg, but he ignored that for the moment. “Reese,” he said, looking the kid in the eye to make sure he had his attention. When he did, he took hold of the weapon and held it in front of the young soldier's face. “It's pretty normal to have nightmares,” he continued. “And pulling your weapon on anything that may be a threat is a reflex that will save your life out there. But in here you are safe and pulling your weapon on anything is going to get the wrong person killed.” It was not just an empty phrase of caution, things like that had happened. Not in Justin's 132nd, fortunately (not yet), but he'd heard about it more than once. In once case it had led to no weapons at all being allowed inside the sleeping quarters, which had then led to half the division being slaughtered when they were too slow to react to a surprise attack.

Once this war was over, humanity would have to invest in a hell of lot of therapists.

Reese nodded wordlessly. He did know that, no doubt. _Knowing_ was not the problem.

“I can understand if you can't feel safe here, even with all these soldiers around you who are your comrades and will protect you even if you're too slow to react one day,” Justin continued. “But if you can't fight down your instincts, you need to make sure that they can't hurt anyone. If you don't know if you can keep down the urge to fight the moment you wake up suddenly, then this,” he lifted the weapon for emphasis, “has to stay out of reach until you know what you're doing.”

Reese nodded wordlessly and then looked down in surprise when Justin handed him back his weapon. He probably hadn't thought he would be trusted with it so easily after what had just happened, but Justin thought it was important to show him that his commander trusted him to know what to do. As Justin stood up again, the kid looked at the gun in his hand for a long moment, before he leaned down and placed it underneath his cot – easily accessibly, but out of immediate reach. Justin smiled, satisfied, and patted the boy's shoulder, before wandering back to his own sleeping place.

It wasn't far, and when he lowered himself down onto the cot he saw Reese settle back to sleep. It was only by the careful way he moved to lie on his right side that his commanding officer remembered that his left shoulder had been dislocated the day before when the kid had been thrown into a wall by an explosion and still had be be pretty sore. It was the same shoulder Justin had just patted, thoughtlessly, because he'd forgotten, and Reese had shown no indication of feeling any pain.

He sighed. Private Reese, who had been assigned to his division early this year after a few months of training near the border to Arizona, was one of those who had spend a considerable amount of time inside one of the machines' work camps, and Justin ought to better remember that, because those soldiers, especially the young ones, came with specific set of issues. Nightmares were one thing – everyone had those, regardless of where they came from. But among other things, the former inmates tended to be very determined not to show pain or any kind of weakness, having been taught by a very harsh environment that those things got them killed immediately. It was something that, ironically, could get them killed now, because they might not seek treatment for their wounds soon enough. It might even get others killed, who were relying on them without being aware they weren't on the top of their game. Justin and the others needed to watch out for that. They had explained the issue, more than once, but the behavior was so ingrained in these people's being that it was almost impossible to unlearn.

He'd talk to Reese about it again tomorrow. Right now, he was going to give both of them a chance to get some more sleep, if they could. Justin himself hadn't exactly been in a deep restful slumber when Reese had started tossing. He's spend most of the last two hours staring at the ceiling in the dimly lit room, and the rest of the time letting his gaze wander over the rows of cots in front of him, wondering how many of these people he would see through the next weeks. They were on their way to San Diego, where the machines had set up a large factory for aerial HKs. It was the first big mission for all those who had only recently joined them, Reese included. For some others it was the second or third. There was a high turnover in this division, and very few people left because they had reached retirement age.

Sometimes he wondered if he did something wrong; if there was be some way for him to protect his men better. But most of the missions they were send on or picked for themselves led them right into the middle of enemy territory, and being saddled with new, inexperienced recruits didn't help. Unfortunately, there was little on offer by way of low-risk training missions. This was not the military Justin had joined more than twenty years ago, before the war. This was a desperate group of people who threw everything they had at an overwhelmingly powerful enemy because the alternative was the annihilation of their species.

He just wished there was a way to do it _better_. Because, yeah, many of these people wouldn't make it through that mission alive, and some of the experienced ones would bite it, too, because the new guys were incapable yet of filling the gabs the last missions had torn. It didn't help to know that other divisions didn't fare any better. The last years had given them a few big missions that resulted in heavy losses for everyone, the most prominent being the attack on the camp in L.A.. The 132nd had been involved in the fights outside the camp, keeping the machines' reinforcements from reaching the camp. Now people from that camp replaced the fallen of those fights and Justin concentrated on finding a comfortable position to lie down in before he could make a list in his mind with the names of all those he didn't expect to make it.

Not that there would be any point to it. Sometimes, the universe surprised him. People, too – as Justin lay back down, his eyes fell on a cot to his right, where Private Eric Sommer, fifteen years old and part of the 132nd for nearly a year, was looking over to Reese, who may already have fallen asleep again. After a long moment of contemplation, Sommer took the weapon he kept beside his thin pillow and shoved it underneath his cot as well.

Justin snorted softly. Surprising indeed.

“Managed not to get shot in the head by friendly fire?” Andrew muttered behind him. He didn't sound sleepy enough to make Justin believe he had only just woken up.

“Maybe tomorrow,” he promised as he shut his eyes, hoping for at least a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.

  


-

  


The year was only a few months old, and yet it was already obvious that this winter would continue, long and harsh, quite possibly straight into the next one. It was so cold that even a slight wind made being outside a miserable experience, and there was another storm brewing on the horizon. The days never got anywhere near true brightness, not with all the dust from the nuclear war lingering in the atmosphere and blocking the sun, but these days the clouds were so thick that it felt like the nights never ended.

In times like this, John envied the young people who had been born after the war and didn't know what they were missing. They didn't like the cold dark days, the stormy weather either, and they could freeze to death in them as well anyone else, but they probably never had days on which they missed the sun so badly it made them want to tear their skin off.

Or maybe they did. John had never asked them. Maybe they needed the sun just as much as he did, without even knowing it. Human bodies were not meant to function forever without it. These were depressing times, with death and loss and fear all around everyone, but he wondered if maybe the level of depression would be a little bit less if every now and again they got a source of light brighter than a light bulb in a basement.

From a practical viewpoint, the weather was terrible because the snow blocked the roads and, while falling, enormously limited their view. Three times the truck had been stuck now and had to be dug free, and they couldn't see enough in this white mess all around to reliably avoid it happening again. And once that storm hit it would become impossible to go anywhere at all.

Until then, they needed to have found shelter.

“Get on with it,” he said as he climbed back into the truck. “We don't have a lot of time.”

“Not enough, if we keep getting stuck,” Evie pointed out. She pressed down onto the accelerator and the truck started moving – with some resistance at first, then more smoothly as it shook off the last hold of the snow dune it had only just escaped.

She was right. They were rapidly running out of time, and at the moment couldn't move much faster than a man could walk, and even for that speed they couldn't see far enough. For the moment the ground was good, but John could already see the next stretch of wavy white coming for them, full of traps.

Just before they entered it he had Evie stop again and jumped out of the truck. For the next twenty minutes, he walked ahead of the vehicle, checking the ground for holes and occasionally calling Hernandez and Ava out to help him shovel aside the highest obstacles _before_ the truck could get stuck in them. By the time they reached the other end of the field he felt like his legs were frozen to the bone and his hands were ready to come off, but from then on, it would be a little easier. They were between the buildings now, and shelter wasn't far.

The fact that this area was under the control of the machines and the army had only a very rough idea of it was a problem, though. They knew they would be able to find shelter around here because buildings tended to offer that. In fact, that was kind of the purpose of buildings. They didn't really know where to find _good_ shelter, though. They needed to drive around until they found a place to leave their truck so it couldn't be accidentally discovered, and they needed to find a place that allowed them to look out for enemies while not being seen by enemies.

Although that part wasn't as important in this case. There was nothing to see outside, and it would be worse once the storm was upon them. There weren't all that many machines around in this weather, either – not all of them could easily maneuver through the high snow or handle the ice coating their metal frames very well – which was why John had picked a day like this for this mission. So their first objective was to find any building that would shelter both them and their vehicle, and when they came upon one that looked good, John and Ava entered it first, to make sure the machines hadn't chosen its garage as a storage room for bots waiting out the winter.

They hadn't. The others followed them inside, parked the truck. Watched the exit, the snow whirling past it, the snow being blown inside. It was dark in here, getting steadily darker. No one spoke.

The storm was blowing the snow this way and that, but mostly away from the opening of the parking garage, which was nice of it, since it would spare them having to dig their way out of here later. Everyone stayed mostly inside the truck; only every now and then did one of them get out to stretch their legs or have a smoke. It wasn't much better inside this garage than it was out of the street and they hadn't sought shelter here to get rest. They were only here to avoid the wind and wait it out, ready to leave the moment the weather gave them a chance.

Still, people slept. They slept sitting in their seats or half-draped across each other. Some were leaning on explosives. They had long since learned to take their rest where they could find it, when they could find it. Right now there was nothing for them to do, so they slept. Everything else would have been a wasted chance.

John got some shuteye as well, and when he woke up, he was surprised to find that he had been asleep for nearly an hour. His neck was stiff and he was cold, but things could be worse. It was quiet inside the vehicle – quiet and dark. The last light had faded while he'd been out, but he could still hear the storm outside. Their time hadn't yet come.

They were well aware that they might be in here for days.

Well. They had food enough for that. Someone had even brought a deck of cards, which was very important because being forced into inaction was a danger John had long since stopped taking lightly. Hernandez had brought a book, as had many others. John had brought status reports from various bunkers that he hadn't had time to look at before, and a general evaluation of the new recruits from the training grounds. All the information that could screw them over if this should fall into the hands of the machines had been redacted, of course.

He wondered if the time would ever come when he could just read a novel without feeling like a traitor to mankind.

Hernandez turned to look at him when he snorted softly. “What's up?”

“I just imagined what my twelve-year old self would say if I went back in time and told him that he would never see a movie again.”

“I was fifteen when the bombs fell,” Corporal Barrett, who had overheard from the back,” quipped in. “There was a movie I had been dying to see for years but my mom was very strict about the rating. She'd promised she'd let me watch it on my sixteenth birthday.” He fell silent, doubtlessly remembering his mother now, and the childhood that ended too early and too suddenly.

“What movie was that?” Ava asked, breaking the mood that had been quickly tumbling towards melancholy. “I probably saw it.”

“You? You're hardly old enough to have watched G-rated movies back then.”

“I had older brothers.” John could head the grin in her voice. Refusing to let spirits drop. “So come on, give me a title.”

Barrett did, and while Ava hadn't seen that one after all, Hernandez had. For a while, everyone engaged in discussions about movies and then in a playful fight about the benefits of Bruce Lee as opposed to Jackie Chan. John did join it for a bit, even though his mind was elsewhere. When the conversation trailed off and everyone went back to what they had been doing before, the air felt lighter even with the storm still screaming outside, and John gave Ava a grateful nod.

Afterward, he turned back to his reports. The collection of pages with information on the new recruits was in his hand and he leafed through it, reading here and there without finding anything that could hold his attention for long. Just notes on the level of expertise with weapons the recruits started out with, their physical health, and in some cases notes on their behavior, generally negative. The reports told him that two of the new ones had been dismissed before finishing training – one because she'd repeatedly picked fights or violently attacked her fellow recruits, the other because he continued to use his firearms carelessly, presenting a danger to himself and the others that could not be ignored. One young man had died in an “incident”, not described in detail. There was a footnote referring to an incident report, but a brief check confirmed that John didn't have it with him. He imagined the one who would fire his gun in crowded rooms or wield it around during discussions without the safety on to accidentally having shot the man, but that was pure speculation. He could just as well have blown himself up or fallen down the stairs.

Eventually he came across Reese's name, and he had to fight the urge to look around and make sure no one could see what he was reading. Ridiculous. There were four people listed on this page, and the only thing that could make his comrades suspect that there was anything special about this one was John acting like there was. He still felt like his attention had to be obvious to everyone else, that all the others could see that he had only bothered with the previous pages to hide how interested he was in this one.

And there wasn't even anything particularly interesting on it. Reese, thirteen years old, had joined the army without any previous experiences with firearms and one single participation in battle – the liberation of his camp. He was still malnourished but in adequate health to join the troops, and had been assigned to the 132nd, under Perry, in January. There were no further notes. Nothing on his behavior, which meant there hadn't been anything negative to report. John supposed that that in itself was remarkable, considering how problematic it usually was for those who had spend a considerable part of their childhood in the camps to fit in. He had still hoped for more.

He made himself look at the last page that came after, but it didn't have anything remarkable on it either. What he learned was how many new recruits had been given to which divisions earlier this year, but that was something he had known anyway. The report had needed a while to make to him, the numbers had not.

When he was done he went through the reports on the bunkers. These were more up to date, but probably didn't hold anything that needed his input, or he would have heard about it by now.

He was right: they didn't. Mostly there were just numbers. How many people had joined them, how many had died or left for other reasons. What capacities they had, mentions of shortages in food and other supplies and the measures that had been taken against that. Reports on the stock of weapons and ammunition. Reports on the general activities in the area, on scavengers and machines. There were references to more detailed reports about incidents inside or around the bunkers, and on missions launched from them, but they weren't included in this collection and John already knew them anyway.

When he was done, he want back to waiting. The storm didn't seem to want to let up. Perhaps he should have brought a book after all.

Then again, his thoughts wouldn't have left him any room to focus. Eventually, when all but one of the headlamps had been turned off and the truck was sinking into silence as everyone but the ones keeping an eye out for danger were asleep, John took the headset from Barrett and send him to the back. He'd spend the rest of the night, or at least the rest of the storm, checking the communication line for relevant information. He wouldn't disturb the others by talking as there was nothing to report. Still in a garage. Weather still bad. Status of the unit: asleep.

They weren't the only ones trapped by the storm. There wasn't a lot going on right now, not on the line he had open. It was still better than nothing. Trying to pay attention to static and words that didn't come left no room for other thoughts and eventually lulled him into a state of half-sleep that was surprisingly relaxing.

The wind gradually lost its force. They wouldn't have to wait for days, after all. About two hours before dawn, John decided that the time had come to leave.

They would need more than two hours to do what they had come to do, but the clouds would continue to be tick and dark all day and the snow, while not as heavy as before, would continue to fall, so there would never be anything more than dim twilight outside. And the movement of the flakes would mess with the machines' sensors. In that regard, this was a perfect day.

Everyone was ready within ten minutes. They could have made it in two, but he was giving them enough warning to take it slow – they weren't in battle, after all. Not yet.

Evie took the wheel again. The exit of the garage was partially covered in snow, but not to the extent where they had to get out the shovels. The road behind wasn't making it easy for them either, but Hernandez had made use of those ten minutes to check it out and deemed it passable. They didn't need to go far on it, anyway. It didn't take long and they reached a stretch of road that had nothing on it but the snow that had fallen this day, mostly blown away by the wind.

“This is either the most ballsy or the most idiotic plan ever,” Hernandez commented now, when the truck turned onto the lanes well maintained and kept free of snow even in the long dark months because the machines regularly used them.

“It's your plan,” John pointed out.

“No. It was my idea. It's your _plan_.”

“Based on your idea.”

“Not every idea that comes up in a brainstorming session ought to be followed. Sometimes you need to sort out the bullshit. That's what they're for.”

“Too late to protest now.” John knew his friend wasn't serious. This was something they had thought of together and discussed with every commander who had ever been this deep into L.A.. It was not a bad plan. Risky. But not bad.

Grim silence fell over the truck. Everyone was aware of the risk. They were used to dangerous missions, but this felt different. The snow fell in silence, but the wind was still strong, its howling drowning out the sound of the tires on the ground. Crunching, Not much different than the sound the chain-wheels of the hunter killers made when they crunched over bones.

Miles to go before their destination, but they were moving faster now. Faster towards doom, perhaps, but it didn't do to be pessimistic. John concentrated on the here and now and blanked out all thoughts on predestination, chances, and collateral damage.

Their target was one of Skynet's relay and repair stations, from which the machines of this particular area were coordinated. Where those that did not follow a never ending pattern returned after their specific task was completed to get their new orders. Where maintenance was carried out.

There were so many machines now, even Skynet could not control them all at the same time. Not directly. For all the resistance had found out, their enemy had created sub-AIs that were in charge of certain matters. And one of them would be toast by the end of this day, if all things went according to plan.

Unfortunately, there was still plenty of day to go through.

They had been planning this mission for a while. Timing was essential in getting close to their target without detection, and so they'd had to wait for the right moment. It had grated on all their nerves, because they were people of action, and as long as this mission was waiting for them they hadn't been able to go on any other that would have taken them away from their base for more than a day, lest they missed the window of opportunity when it came.

What they needed was weather like this. Sneaking up to the station on a clear day was out of the question, but so was doing it in the middle of a storm, since that made movement impossible. The aftermath of a strong one was perfect, since it not only covered them in the still harsh wind, but also because the storm itself would clear the streets of machines and it would take a while for them to come out again – especially if they had no reason to suspect anything to do.

And they needed the streets of the clear of them because in order to get their vehicle anywhere at all they needed to use the machines' very own streets. They would also need those streets to get away, so the mission better not be a failure.

A particularly strong gust of wind hit the side of the truck and shook it. Evie's lips were pressed into a grim line, all her focus on the treacherous road. In the gray veil of snow and beginning dawn, the idea of a looming skyscraper showed up in front of them, like a silent sentinel over this part of town. John grabbed his backpack to check his EMP one last time.

  


-

  


There was no snow on the ground. Kyle hadn't seen such a wide stretch of space without snow or ice in so long it felt surreal now, like a different world. It was ugly; the ground bare of anything, just naked earth and rocks, where metal pipes broke through like bleached bones through the skin of a rotting corpse. But it was something else, something unexpected, and that made it fascinating, made it seem like there was a world out there beyond the one he had seen. Like a possibility.

He ignored the impression it left and the emotions it evoked in him and focused instead on what it _meant_. The snow had melted away here even though it was icy cold, because the pipes and the ground they ran beneath were heated by the processes running in this complex. Their vehicles would run differently on this ground – it was soft, muddy. That would slow them down, possibly even get them stuck. The soldiers would enter the area on food, spread out. There was very little cover in the center, leaving them to come from the sides, which made entry of the complex more difficult. If they had to run, the soft ground and the partially buried pipes would make it hard to move, possibly trip them. Dangerous. The chances to survive a hasty retreat across this area were slim.

There were no machines to be seen, but that didn't mean they weren't there. This was an important factory for them: it produced their power cells, without which the bots were just motionless, pointless heaps of junk. They ran for decades – the newer models for up to a century, or so the technicians of the army were guessing. Blowing up this factory would soon result in a drastic decline of machines in this area – perhaps Skynet would have to give up Del Mar, and maybe even San Diego completely to concentrate its forces on Los Angels, which was more important. Kyle's heart beat faster at the thought of them making this much of a difference here, but he quickly controlled himself and turned his thoughts back to the relevant facts.

Aside from denying the machines access to their power cells, the mission also aimed to collect as many of those as possible for the rebellion to use. It was only a secondary goal, as the destruction of this facility took precedence, but it would aid them greatly in their efforts to bring the machines down.

Kyle liked the idea of using the machines' own tools against them. He was not, however, part of the team that was to try and secure those cells. His team, made of four soldiers, was to keep off the machines that would come from the outside once their presence was discovered, so the others would have time to finish their sabotage.

This was the first real mission he was on, although it would not be the first time he saw action. In the four months he had been with the 132nd, they had crossed the State of California twice and had met plenty of the heavily armed machines that patrolled the ruins of the cities. Kyle was well familiar with his semi-automatic and his handgun by now, and also with all sorts of explosives. Since their last encounter with heavy machines on the way to San Diego, he was also familiar with the blast radius of the explosive ammunition used by the aerial hunter killers.

The pain in his shoulder was background noise to him, not worthy of acknowledgment unless he tried to do something that made it flare up. Even then he could ignore it; it didn't register as a problem. He'd been very lucky. The HK hadn't missed its target; it simply hadn't been him.

The signal came and the group started moving. Fourteen altogether were left after the others had gone to make their way into the complex. The explosives were to go up in fifteen minutes. Whether they did or not, by then then the ones who went underground to get the power cells had to be back, regardless of whether they had managed to secure their objective or not. Magnetic fields in this area interfered with their communication, so everyone had to stick to their respective time tables, or get blown up.

Anyone who wasn't back where they were supposed to be when the time ran out would be considered dead. There were security measures down there, and if they got the invading team, the ones above ground wouldn't know. The same applied to the team going inside to plant the explosives. If they didn't make it out in fifteen minutes plus X, the mission would be considered a failure.

Kyle and the others wouldn't have to check the time. They were within view of the only exits both underground and into the looming building before them. They would retreat when they saw the others. Or when Perry or his second-in-command would give them the signal to abort. He bit his lips nervously, afraid to do something wrong and somehow manage to ruin this for everyone. It was his task to watch the others' backs and protect them while they did their jobs, and he didn't want to mess it up and get them killed. But he thought about the words Perry had had for him and the other new ones before they arrived – that even inexperienced protection was better than no protection at all and nothing they could do wrong would be as bad as doing nothing – and focused his attention on his environment instead as they started moving. There were two experienced soldiers in his group, anyway: Julian and Corporal Kira. All he had to do was follow their lead.

The group of fourteen split into two groups of seven once they reached the barren field, one turning left to stay in the protection of the rocks and metal contraptions that framed it, then other doing the same on the right side. A minute later, three of them stayed behind to watch the sky in all directions from their chosen spot. Kyle and the other three moved on.

About a hundred meters from their position, there was an unevenly shaped hole in the front of the building; a constructional necessity for ventilation and access to maintenance shafts, as Colonel Jackson had explained. The shafts were too small for the soldiers to enter, but the hole went several meters deep into the complex and would give them cover, while also allowing them to watch the entrance – large enough to allow the coming and going of transporters – and cover it in fire if necessary.

They were still fifty meters from their destination when bullets started hitting the rock left and right of them. Kyle instinctively ducked behind a bowler, seeking cover. He kept moving, taking in the path before him and finding the way through that offered the most protection. He didn't know where those shots were coming from. His eyes briefly went up to the building where he expected a turret or a mobile machine that had seen their approach, but there was nothing. Seconds later he heard the guns of the group theyhad parted with a minute ago. From behind them, then. He changed his path just in time to be on the right side of the rocks when the next bullets hit.

Only then did he turn around to see what was going on. He made out two machines coming closer from the west, just barely visible in the hazy light of dusk. They were far away and didn't look big but their fire was accurate enough. More bullets hit the rock where Kyle had been a moment before. He stopped for but a second, knowing quite well that his semi-automatic had no chance of hitting anything from this distance. Kira, who had a stronger weapon, yelled at him to keep moving, so he did. Kyle turned to follow Julian and Ferro and Kira turned to face the enemy with the heavy rifle brought up and was moved down by a spray of bullets.

Kyle had to wait for another three seconds before he crossed a gab in his cover. There was more gunfire behind them now, which told him that the approaching machines had moved into firing range. Kyle didn't waste time looking – there was nothing he could do before he had reached his goal, the alcove inside that building right before him. Julian and Ferro were already there, climbing up now with easy movements and a lot of haste. Kyle had lost only seconds looking for their attackers and trying not to get shot, but it had been enough to fall behind. Now, before the last stretch of uncovered ground, Julian gestured for him to wait. He was watching the area in Kyle's back and Kyle didn't turn to look himself, waiting instead for the signal to follow.

Eventually it came, with Julian opening and closing his hand twice. Kyle had ten seconds to make it across the last twenty meters and up into the cover of the building. That wouldn't be a problem.

Or so he thought, until he reached up to grab the lowest ledge that would help him climb up and sharp pain shot through his shoulder, taking him by surprise and halting his momentum. He pulled himself together in a second and tried again, but it was painful and clumsy and he couldn't get a good grip with his hand that suddenly seemed to have lost all strength. The seconds ticked away from him and Kyle was aware that he was an idiot who should have listened to Perry when had he told them not to ignore their injuries, and that he was going to die now.

Over the noise, he heard Julian curse a blue streak above him. Then a strong hand close around Kyle's wrist and roughly pulled him up, just when bullets started hitting left and right. Kyle made it to the platform and was pushed left, behind a thick concrete pillar, and Justin was riddled with bullets, one of them hitting his head with such force that his skull seemed to explode backwards and rained blood and other matter all over Ferro, who'd stood just to the right, behind cover, where it was safe.

Even in the semi-darkness of their hiding place Kyle could see that all color had drained from her face, that her eyes were wide and unable to leave the bloody mess before her. Three things were running through his mind: That this was his fault (if he had been able to climb without help Julian wouldn't have had to expose himself), that there was something big coming towards the exit from inside the building (it was so massive he could feel the ground vibrate as it moved closer), and that he was alone in this one. Kira and Julian were dead and Ferro, twelve years old and, as far as he knew, without any direct experience with messy death, seemed frozen in place by the sudden, ugly reality of their situation.

The reality of their situation also included this giant enemy that came rolling towards them. It wouldn't be able to see them where they where, for there was a wall between them and the inside of the building, but they probably weren't its target anyway. Not yet. It would go for the groups outside first, who had by now brought down the two smaller machines that had killed Kira and Julian.

It was Kyle's and Ferro's duty to stop it from doing so, and Ferro was not a factor he could reliably calculate into the plan of action right now. In fact, he couldn't plan anything yet, because he didn't have enough facts. All he knew was that he had a handgun and a semi-automatic at his disposal, which wouldn't do much against a machine that was too heavily armored or too far away. Then there were Ferro's weapons which he could take should she be unable to use them herself, and Julian's powerful rifle – which he should pick up as long as there was nothing firing at them from the direction that left half their cave exposed.

He did so, using his knife to cut the strap of the weapon rather than trying to pull it off the heavy corpse. Ferro was staring at _him_ now, as if she couldn't believe was she was seeing. Kyle ignored her, quickly checking the weapon instead. It appeared to be undamaged,

Whatever was rolling towards them was very near now. They had explosives. If the thing couldn't be stopped with their firearms, they would have to throw those and hope the resulting explosion wouldn't get them, too. Their current position offered some cover, but it didn't leave them any place to run.

And Ferro was standing half exposed in the middle of the cave, he noticed. Kyle quickly moved over to her, to push her out of the way of any bullets that might fly their way. It probably saved his life, as seconds later the wall he had cowered against crumbled under the force of an explosion.

Although the wall was gone now, it had still mostly protected them from the blast. Not from the noise, through, and not from the dust that filled the air around them. Kyle couldn't see anything; all he could do was push his comrade deeper into cover and try to figure out what had just happened.

It certainly hadn't been a direct hit, else the would be dead now. So it probably hadn't been meant for them. Had one of their own tried to attack the thing rolling past them just now? Kyle could only speculate, and that didn't help at the moment. What mattered was that the wall was gone, leaving them open to anything that came from that site. All they could hope for was that the enemy didn't know they were here.

Or destroy it before it could start shooting at them. They weren't here to hide, after all. They were here to keep things like this off the others' backs so they could complete their mission.

The dust settled slowly, and through it Kyle could make out the broad, broad gate the machine was rolling through. He didn't see much more that its vague shape, but even that pulled on something deep inside him – something he needed to turn off if he wanted to stay focused.

On the other side of the opening, the wall was intact, and behind it four more soldiers were waiting for their chance to attack. The angle was bad, of course: no one had expected anything big to come _out_ of the building. Kyle and the others were positioned here to keep anything from going in. He wondered now if that meant that their mission had already failed, that the team inside the complex had run into this enemy and been wiped out before they could plant the explosives, but he hadn't heard any sounds of fighting from within, and as long as they didn't know they could only keep to the plan. And that plan told them to hold this position for another eight minutes, or until they got a signal to retreat.

If there was anyone left to give it.

The machine before him was facing the other way. That much Kyle could see. A second later, the opposite wall exploded and he finally grasped that the machine must have calculated that the alcoves left and right of the gate were a likely place for enemies to be and was targeting them in a prophylactic measure.

Seconds after the other wall had fallen, shots ran out from inside the dust cloud that rose in its wake, and Kyle could see what would happen just before, inevitably, it did. The soldier's weapons didn't do anything to stop the machine, but they gave away that there really was someone in there. It fired back before anyone could get an explosive ready and then the opening it had created was just a hole full of fire. The machine got its bulk moving again, slowly moving towards the open field where the other soldiers were fighting off smaller machines following the two that had decimated their numbers earlier. Kyle and Ferro were still alive because the moment their cover had been taken from them, they hadn't been in a position to fight back.

They were now. And they couldn't just sit by and let that one go. Kyle considered his options. His own guns and Ferro's were not powerful enough to do anything about this thing, and from the angle he had he couldn't throw any explosives. It left Julian's rifle, but even with that he would have to find a weak spot, and he'd had barely enough training with that weapon to know how it worked. Still, it was the best chance they had.

Before he could start firing at anything he needed a clear view of the target, else anything he did would be completely ineffective and only get them killed for nothing. Kyle had to let several more precious seconds go by before a gust of wind blowing into the opening thinned the smoke enough for him to make out the machine slowly rolling away from them.

Recognition hit him like a physical blow. For a second all he could see was his father on the ground and a machine very much like this rolling towards him with no chance to escape. He thought he heard the crunching sound again that had reached his ears after his mother had carried him around a corner, breaking his line of sight. The rifle trembled in his hands, the weight of it suddenly too heavy to hold up. Then he lifted it anyway, aiming for the weak spot he knew was there in the joint between main body and top. It would not destroy this thing, but it might stop it.

His shot missed completely. It didn't even hit the machine. Kyle only knew it had hit the opposite wall of the entrance area because the machines halted its move forward and turned its attention there. As soon as it had found the hole left by his bullet it would know what direction the shot had come from, and the moment it saw them, they would be toast. Kyle took aim once more. The rifle was balanced on rubble to keep it steady, so he didn't have to hold up its considerable weight, but the throw back had punched him into his injured shoulder and he found himself reluctant to do that again. It was a distant notion, though. For a second he considered moving it to his other shoulder but the unfamiliar position would have thrown his aim even more. Seconds to go now. Kyle moved the weak joint, now exposed by the machine turning, into the center of the cross hairs and pulled the trigger.

This time he hit the machine – he could hear it by the sound of the bullet hitting metal – but not where he wanted to. And the machine was turning towards them. In a moment both he and Ferro would die, because Julian was gone and Kyle couldn't fucking aim.

He saw it at the last second: A panel at the back of the machines was missing, and beneath it Kyle could just barely make out what he could only suspect was a power core. So this thing had been here to get its batteries replaced. It hadn't waited for them. This had not been a trap. Sergeant Myles in the other alcove and his team were dead because of bad timing.

With no alternative and no time to think, Kyle aimed for the opening and the power core inside it; a much larger target that he might actually have a chance to hit. The things were clear to him: That he had time for exactly one shot, and that he didn't know how bad the explosion would be if this worked. It might just as well take him out as well, and Ferro. But they were going to die anyway, and this might save the others. He pulled the trigger and the machine stopped its turn towards them.

For a moment, nothing happened. Kyle knew that he should get away now in case two meters of distance more might save his life, but the thought didn't prompt any kind of action. He stared at the machine, and then machine stood still. Then something hissed inside it. Then something hit Kyle hard in the side and topped him over, behind the rubble of the collapsed wall.

Finally, the machine exploded, the fire of it searing over the skin of his hands as he covered his face. When he could see again, Ferro was lying beside him, batting at the flames that licked up her coat, and Kyle helped her put them out. She had saved his life when she tacked him down. Kyle nodded his acknowledgment and she nodded back. Then she pulled him towards the exit and he noticed that the rifle had fallen into the flames. They knew better than to linger beside a fire arm that was on fire. This place offered no protection now, anyway.

They jumped out and hit the ground running. Around them fighting was going on. It seemed impossible that the mission might have succeeded, that they had managed to protect their comrades inside the complex. Kyle focused on the inferno in front of him, blanking out all thoughts of infernos somewhere else. The men and women inside the building and underground were experienced soldiers who knew what they were doing. Until he learned differently or the signal to retreat was given, he would continue to defend the place as if he knew that they were sill alive.

He hoped that they were, he found, and that was something new as well. Not something he had the time to dwell on, but something he noticed none the less. Since Laina and Alex, he hadn't cared if anyone lived or died; he'd merely hoped, in some cases, that when they died they died quickly. Because death had always been inevitable. And because none of the people who'd shared the camp with him had meant enough for him to care whether or not they would continue to do so.

Behind him, Ferro called out and he found cover behind a rock just before bullets hit the ground behind him. His fellow soldier had already ducked into a crater blown by a recent explosion, barely protected from the fire of the medium-sized machine that came their way. It was not a good cover – even worse than Kyle's. And she couldn't get out because the machine knew that, too, and was focusing its fire on her. Kyle readied his semi-automatic and swiftly moved around the rock to get a better angle.


	19. 2021 - 2/3

The mission had gone well – much better than John had dared to hope. They had accomplished their objective, no one had died, and the myth John Connor had been expanded for another chapter. He thought the last bit with some bitterness when they were welcomed back to their base with cheers and applause, but didn't say anything. Instead, he played along as gracefully as he could before retreating to the communications room. All this cheer and the praise for pulling off something that had seemed, if not impossible, then at least very crazy, weren't really for him. They were for everyone. It was important to acknowledge the victories, and they all needed that moment of triumph – of feeling like they had a chance.

So he let them celebrate, and did not point out that Ava was in medical with a deep, infected cut that might still cost her her leg. He didn't even tell the rest of his team to take it easy and get some rest while they could since the next mission or attack could come sooner than expected. (They were knew their lives and their limitations. If they felt they needed to celebrate and revel in the moment in order to get the energy they needed for the next weeks and months, they would do so, and if they felt they needed sleep in order to achieve that, they would go the fuck to bed.) He even told the two women in communications to go and celebrate with the others for a while, because they looked like they needed it. He would take over for them, he promised, and he did – but for several minutes there was only silence in the headphones, because it was morning and there wasn't much going on. John was glad. He needed the silence, and he needed the chance to scan the notes on the various missions lying around, to get an overview of what he had missed.

There was a lot going on. More than there had been for a long time, and it was another reminder of how much the attack on the camp in Los Angeles had dominated everyone's life in one way or another for so long. That, and the chaos that followed the emergence of the first terminators, the loss of their main base in 2018. They had recovered from that. They had freed the camp. Everything was back to normal now, with everyone more eager than ever to kick the metal motherfuckers in the ass.

There were no more camps to be freed. They had been correct with that prediction. General Brewster had managed to liberate a small and not too well guarded one just past the Canadian border just hours after the L.A. mission had been declared a success. It had happened at the last moment, before the machines set everything there on fire. All the other camps that still existed all over the country – seven that the army knew about – had been terminated.

It had dampened the triumph everyone had felt about L.A., and the fact that they had known it would probably come like this, that they had knowingly sacrificed those people had dampened it even more. At least there had been a good turnout of people from L.A. joining the army, so anyone who needed to justify it had numbers to back up the decision.

John didn't like thinking about justification there. It indicated that they had done something wrong, when really there had been no other choice. They had known that the next camp they took would probably prompt Skynet to kill all the others and L.A. had been the biggest one. Not taking it, or taking another in its place, would only have resulted in the death of even more people.

Mathematics. In the absence of any other base for their decisions, that was always what it came down to.

Except there had been another factor to base the decision on, and that was the likeliness that Kyle Reese was in Los Angeles and the fact that without him all would be lost. John had not based his decision on that. He hadn't needed to, since the numbers already dictated that they took this camp and let go of every other, but sometimes he wondered. If there had been any indication that Reese was in another camp, what would he have done? Would he have taken that one, coming up with some excuse or another for sacrificing the hundreds of people in L.A.? Or would he have trusted that fate would do its work without him and gone for L.A., possibly sacrificing the history of the past thirty-some years and mankind's chance for survival for it?

He didn't think about it much. That way lay madness. Mostly it was just something to be grateful for: He hadn't known Reese was in L.A., but it had been likely, and there had been no indication he would be anywhere else, so it had been a decision he didn't have to consciously make.

Either way, it was done. Of the almost three hundred survivors of the camp, more than two thirds had joined the army and by now had gone through their first experiences fighting the machines out there. John knew from experience that people from the camps tended to be very enthusiastic about that – sometimes overly so.

Some of them were dead by now, because people died quickly here, no matter where they came from. John knew the numbers. Not the names. Not even how many of the soldiers killed this year had come from L.A.. There was no point to that, to turning every death into a personal tragedy, with a name and story behind it. They were all personal tragedies, but they weren't his tragedy. No one could live like that, burdening themselves with all the grief of strangers. Not even Kate. In fact, John often thought that his wife was better at compartmentalizing than he was.

He hadn't seen her in weeks. This was not their head quarters, where Kate and the children were, it was a smaller base closer to the center of Los Angeles. The ceilings were low, the air filled with dust, and smoke from open fireplaces that were their only source of heat here. It was even less comfortable than the bunker that was their main base of operations as well as their center of medical help and food distribution, but it was less crowded, too, and that was worth something at least.

John had spend a lot of his life in places like this.

Even though this was a military base that ran exclusively military operations, there were civilians here. Not many of them, but when wandering families or groups of people who had somehow managed to hide in the ruins while the machines had controlled all of the city, slowly starving to death, had stumbled over them, they couldn't have turned them away. Most of those arrivals had taken a gun and a headset and headed out with the next division leaving this bunker, but some were too young or too damaged in one way or another to do so. And one father, while in good shape, simply did not want to leave his two young children on their own, or in the care of virtual strangers, while he went to war. John wasn't happy about that – no one was – but a part of him, just like every other parent, wished he could do the same.

One way or another, they were a part of this bunker now, trying to make it as livable as possible for themselves and for the soldiers who had to stop here. Therefore, no one really minded their presence too much, even though everyone agreed it would be better if they moved on to some place a little further from the action.

But those places were already overcrowded, and many of the civilians here were not in shape to make it there on their own. There were not enough soldiers stationed here to accompany them, and those passing through had different missions. The dozen or so civilians living here weren't good, but the alternative wasn't necessarily all that much better, so things, John knew, would remain as they were for the foreseeable future.

It was the same in almost all the bunkers that littered the area.

Sometimes John took a moment to wonder what would become of all these people, civilians and soldiers alike, when the war was over, but that was something for idle moments, which were few. Right now, he had reports to read and occasional, drifting exchanges on the comms to listen to.

There wasn't much going on, so the reports had his full attention. He checked for anything on Perry's 132nd first, with no one around whose presence would force him to pretend that wasn't the thing he was most interested in. As it turned out, that division had just completed a mission in Del Mar, where they had blown up a factory for the machines' power cells. The mission had been successful in that they had destroyed the place and secured about a dozen power cells for the army, but it had come with heavy losses, not individually listed in this rudimentary report. John was fairly sure that his father had not been among those killed, on the ground of him still being here, reading this, but that didn't mean he hadn't been hurt. He'd have to wait for a full report to come in to learn more, and depending on what Perry's schedule looked like and how much trouble they would run into, that could take a while.

Alternately, he found soon after, he could just ask. Perry himself came on the radio just minutes after John had finished with his report to check in with command and inform them that his division would start the way back to HQ in an hour. The radio connection distorted his voice, but John thought he sounded tired.

After his General had identified himself, Perry asked about John's own most recent mission. He sounded genuinely delighted when he learned that it had gone down without losses.

“I just saw that your own mission did not go as well,” John remarked when he had the chance. It wasn't meant as criticism; things went wrong in some way three times out of four where the machines were involved and he trusted Perry's abilities as a commander enough to assume that it hadn't been his fault.

Judging by the report that followed, he was right in that assumption. The mission had been made more dangerous than anticipated by the fact that a large H.K. had been present in the complex they were sabotaging, by pure coincidence but ready to kick their asses. And the entire mission had been very risky, but John and the rest of the brass where the ones who had ordered the mission in the first place, so they couldn't point fingers now.

And sadly, if they didn't take risks that could, and would, get people killed all the time, there would have been nothing left of humanity at this point but some slaves in the extermination camps.

Altogether, Perry had lost eight men in that attack, most of them – surprisingly – experienced soldiers.

“What about the new recruits?” John asked. “Did you keep them away from the action?”

“Not possible in that setup,” Perry explained. “I didn't send them into the buildings, but the teams inside the buildings ended up having the least trouble of them all. I gave the new ones guard duty, but as it happened that was where things went south. That only one of the new guys got killed is mostly due to their more weathered comrades looking out for them.”

And dying for them, it seemed. John sighed. From an economic point of view, the losses of inexperienced new recruits would have been less terrible than that of soldiers who knew what they were doing, but he tried not to see it that way and sure as hell wouldn't say it.

  


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“You have some people from the L.A. camp in your unit, don't you?” Connor asked, proving that he, too, was thinking about the issues that came with those particular people a lot. “How did they handle the mission? I'm especially wondering about the kids.”

“I have two camp-kids, but there's only one kid from L.A. here. Survived. Did a good job but got his team leader killed.” That sounded harsh. Justin wanted to elaborate but Connor already asked him to do just that, his voice sharp.

He was probably thinking they needed to take the kid out of the army, because that happened more often than not. Justin found that he didn't like the idea. Reese had the potential to become a good soldier if he lived through a few more missions, and they needed some of those to fill in the latest gabs.

“It's partially my fault,” Justin amended. “He was hurt before we left for this mission and kept it secret because that's what those camp-kids do. I knew about it and meant to remind him of how important it is to let your comrades know your limitations, order him to be honest about how bad it was, but, well, things were busy, he was hiding it well, and I forgot. “

There was really no excuse for that. It was the kind of thing a commander had to think about in order to protect their men, and protecting their men was a commander's job. Connor, judging by his icy silence, clearly agreed.

But what the General said when he broke that silence was, “No reminder should have been necessary. Every soldier ought to know that, no matter where they come from.”

“Easier said than done. You don't get that kind of ingrained thinking out of anyone's head in a couple of weeks. It's not an uncommon problem.”

“It shouldn't be any problem at all. It's a simple rule that gets people killed if it is ignored. Who doesn't get that can't be a soldier. Keep an eye on the kid. When that happens again, he has to go.”

“I don't think it will happen again,” Justin replied honestly. “Private Reese is well aware that his team leader wouldn't have been hit if he had been upfront with his injuries. I didn't even need to say anything.” He still had said plenty, and it had been a lot like kicking a puppy, but it was a puppy that paid attention and agreed with everything his commanding officer threw at him. “The kid has learned this lesson, Sir. This is not a mistake he will repeat.”

“You said yourself that the way of seeing these things is so deeply ingrained it can't be easily overcome.”

“True. But I got the impression that Reese is fully aware of the consequences of his mistake and regrets them enough to avoid a repeat experience.” And that had been another pleasant surprise. One of the many problems with those who had spend a significant portion of their youth in a camp was that due to the way they had lived, they had a hard time caring for anyone but themselves. Getting someone else killed was not something everyone would have accepted as problematic.

“Well.” Connor sounded reluctant to accept Justin's assessment. He was a commanding officer, too, and trying to keep as much avoidable harm away from his men as possible. “I trust your judgment. Still, keep your eye out for that one. Don't let him endanger your troop, and don't let him get himself killed over something stupid. You said there was one more kid from a camp with you? How are they doing?”

“That would be Private Sommer, Sir. He's been with us since last year, not that much longer than Reese. He's been difficult now and again, just scraping by, but it seems he's finally getting there. Actually,” he added, because that seemed like something Connor ought to know given the topic of their discussion, “I think Reese has a positive influence on him. Sommer's been trying harder to fit in and make it work since Reese's joined the team.”

Connor made a sound that may have expressed surprise, or doubt, or merely acknowledgment. Maybe it was a snort. The connection made that hard to tell. “I'm glad he's found a friend,” he said, and that definitely sounded doubtful, and not at all like he got what Justin was trying to tell him. It was probably hard to see from the outside.

There was no one younger than twenty in Connor's own team, and certainly no kids from the camps. The General knew of the problems from reports and brief incidents in the main bases, not from dealing with these people on a daily basis. And it didn't really matter, anyway, as long as he accepted that Justin knew better than him and trusted him to lead his men in a way that suited them all.

And he seemed to do so, since he let the topic drop. Justin therefore refrained from telling him that he didn't think that Reese and Sommer were friends, or that they had exchanged more than five sentences since they started serving together. It was of no consequence to Connor anyway.

Aside from that, Justin had some questions regarding the plans for the future, his division's next objectives, as well as suggestions for the use of those power cells his teams had secured at that factory. It wasn't often that he had General Connor himself on the line and no pressing matters firing at them from elevated positions, so he would make use of the opportunity while he could.

  


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Kyle had been in the base in San Diego only once before, very briefly. He was looking at their imminent return there with mixed feelings. It was large, there were more people, but it also offered more spare for everyone, and a somewhat bigger variety or food, and large bathrooms for washing, rather than the small basins that they had to made do with in the small bases that usually housed the divisions during their missions. But while the walls of the small bunkers sometimes seemed to close in on him, the larger bunker only meant more walls, and more areas he wasn't familiar with. (Not knowing the territory was deadly - that was an instinct he still hadn't been able to shake off, and it was something that still applied.) More people meant more strangers he didn't know and couldn't assess. Bathing in public rooms made him feel trapped and vulnerable (all those strangers around didn't help), and after a lifetime of eating discolored sludge two times a day, every day, any meal that was not discolored sludge was perfect to him.

In the end none of that mattered. San Diego was the place where they would get provisions and equipment, new orders, and possibly new men for their unit. How Kyle, or anyone else, felt about the place, was inconsequential, and as with all inconsequential things, he did his best to push the thoughts and feelings aside and focus on the things that were of consequence, starting with those demanding his immediate attention.

Like the way ahead of them. They were taking a break right now, at the mouth of a white snow field that seemed to stretch endlessly and flat in front of them, until it melted into the gray dusk that crept across the snow toward them. What was left of their divisions fit into the two transports that had survived the past week, but the plain that looked flat was not, underneath the snow. Someone always had to go wander in front of the trucks to see if the ground was passable, and there were places where anyone but the driver had to get off the vehicles to reduce their weight.

Everyone was nervous, and while no one had told him with those exact words, he knew that they were traveling across ice. And he knew that that was dangerous, that sometimes the ice gave and swallowed whatever or whoever had pushed it past the breaking point. He knew that because the older soldiers all dreaded it, and he'd overheard them talk about it. Kyle himself lacked the proper appreciation for the danger, since the only ice he had ever seen were frozen mud puddles. He'd never seen the ocean, or a lake, or even a river. The idea that they were standing on one right now filled him with a mix of fear and exhilaration. Lacking any actual experience with the medium, he kept his feelings to himself and just followed the lead of those who knew what they were doing.

The trip was hard and exhausting and they had to make plenty of stops, in places that were deemed safe enough. Kyle suspected that there was solid ground underneath them right now, and the soft, barely perceptible slope downwards until the plain of snow evened out again seemed to support his theory. He thought about asking, but if the others hadn't told them about the ice, they didn't want them to know, and maybe they wouldn't answer. Or it would be awkward. Anyway, Ferro was sitting not far from him and Kyle didn't know if _she_ knew. If she didn't, he didn't want to give it away by talking about it where she could hear. She knew more about the world than he did; surely she knew enough to share everyone else's dread.

A danger one didn't know about was a danger one couldn't defend against, was the general rule. He got that that didn't apply here, since they were in the presence of people who did know the danger and were leading them through it. Knowing about it, he gathered, would only lead to fear, and there were already enough things in the world to be afraid of.

They had started early, long before sunset, which served to support Kyle's idea that Perry and Jackson wanted to get across this stretch of the road before the next morning. The weather wasn't bad. It wasn't snowing, and the wind wasn't too strong, and while the thin mist that had been lying over the land all day was limiting their view into the distance, it also helped to shroud their presence. With the white planes over the trucks and the gray hooded capes everyone outside the truck had to wear over their clothes, they would be all but invisible from the air. Their commanders still wouldn't have chosen this long route over unprotected ground that could be used against them if there had been anything in a radius of fifty kilometers that would make the machines come here.

That they had opted for this route at all meant that is was an enormous shortcut, which meant that they were in a hurry to get back. Kyle wondered why. He knew that Perry had talked to Connor on the comm two days ago. Maybe something had come up.

He wished he knew more and didn't have to resort to guessing so much, but he still wasn't sure how much he was actually allowed to ask. On top of that, it was obvious that the older soldiers had a bond that the new ones were exempt from, and him getting Julian killed certainly hadn't done anything to endear him to them.

Currently, no one was talking to anyone. Two people were checking the trucks and one was busy securing the plane that had come loose and was flapping softy in the weak but constant wind. Everyone else was sitting in the trucks, where the plane protected them from the icy breeze. Kyle shivered and burrowed deeper into his coat while he stared at the white landscape fading into the onset of night. The sight touched something inside him, some memory of a nightmare he'd had recently. Something about this wide open field of nothing reminded him of the camp.

He wondered if there were bodies underneath the snow.

The man who had been fiddling with the plane was done. He climbed into the truck and rubbed his hands together, trying to warm them. Only then did he slip his cloves back on. Kyle wondered why he had taken them off in the first place. The knots that secured the plane should be workable even with them on.

The man was called Gustav by the others; Kyle thought of him as Captain Otts. He was pretty old – at least forty-five, maybe even older. There were a lot of people in this division that were old like that and Kyle always felt a bit of awe around them, because they had spend most of their life in this army, fighting machines, and were still alive. The oldest of them, Colonel Rias, was missing an eye, but that was all the machines had been able to take from her in all the years since the war. Kyle had heard her say once that technically, Skynet had done her a favor, as the missing eye made her a better sniper.

Captain Otts still had both his eyes, and he still had all of his fingers, even though he took off his gloves where he didn't have to. (Kyle thought about Laina and the black stumps her fingers had turned into as they froze off.) His hair was long and white as the snow, and strands of it were blowing into Kyle's field of vision as he took the spot right beside him, shielding him from the wind but also obscuring his vision.

Not for long, though. They had to leave just minutes later, their breaks short because they had ground to cover yet. Kyle didn't want to think, as they walked into the growing darkness, about being out here in the night, when it would be pitch black in a way it had never been in the camp. Unable to turn on the truck's headlines for fear of discovery. How could they not get lost here, then? Walk around aimlessly until they froze or the ground gave and swallowed them.

It was the idea that people like Rias, Otts, or Perry should end like that after fighting for so long that upset him the most.

Rias was driving the first truck right now, a much younger man called Ben the other one. They took turns, and it was a popular job right now since anyone who had to drive didn't have to walk through the snow. Kyle wouldn't get a turn because no one had taught him to drive yet. He wondered if he would ever get around to learning.

The snow was too soft to crunch beneath their feet as they walked. Soft enough to make every step difficult, but there was no break for a long time, even though Kyle wasn't the only one exhausted. Ennis, who had been injured in the last mission, eventually fell behind and had to be dragged on by to of the others. Still he wasn't allowed to ride the truck. In fact, everyone was ordered to stay away from it.

It felt like they were racing the night across the plain, eager to make it to the other side before the darkness took the world. Kyle assumed that it was only him who felt that way, for if this was a race, they lost it. It wasn't long before everything around them turned to shadow, and then the shadows spread and turned into everything. Even the people walking closest to Kyle were little more than a sense of movement. The snow was too soft to crunch and with no source of light anywhere in sight, Kyle soon felt like there was no one else in the world. He was reminded once again of his dream, but he just kept walking.

At some point, someone called his name and then something was placed in his hand that he identified as a length of rope. It would keep him from getting lost, and all the others as well. From what Kyle could tell, there were three more holding on to this one, while one end was tied to the truck. They were supposed to hold them, not tie them to their belts. No explanation was given for that, but the reason was obvious.

Not everyone was depending on the rope. A few of the others were wearing night goggles, including the drivers. There weren't enough for all of them, not even for half, and Perry had ordered everyone who wasn't able to see to take the clips out of their weapons and keep them out of their hands. He even explained that he didn't want anyone to spook in the dark and accidentally shoot their own men. It made sense. Kyle had complied without protest, but Sommer and even some of the older ones had to be asked twice.

That, too, Kyle could understand. He felt vulnerable and alone – worse, he still had to struggle against the notion that other people in the dark were a potential threat. But the danger of hurting someone else, blind with a loaded weapon, scared him even more.

And he _was_ scared. It was not the familiar fear of the very real threats and possibilities that used to fill him with horror in the camp, or the adrenaline-filled, tense awareness of imminent death that came with battle. This was less substantial, but no less deep on a different level. It was something he could shield himself with logical thoughts (these where his allies, no one here would hurt him or any of the others, whatever came for them from the dark would be stopped by the ones who could see, machines couldn't come near them without being heard in this total silence) but not chase away. Instinctual, perhaps. Kyle wasn't quite sure if that was the correct word. He had only just learned it.

All he knew that darkness used to be his ally, and now, here, it wasn't. He had been in complete darkness before. This wasn't even complete, perfect darkness. Even though the snow had virtually no light to reflect at all, there still was the idea of movement where the others walked, with the trucks as wells of deeper darkness in their center. In the bunkers, where they sometimes stayed for a few days between missions, it was pitch black when all the lights where out. They usually weren't, but it had happened twice that the power suddenly went out and everyone had been blind until someone managed to light a torch. Kyle hadn't been afraid then. Tense, perhaps. Never afraid. Not even in the early days, when all these people had been strangers. The darkness between walls was different. It was his friend, almost. Out here, surrounded by nothing and nothing in all directions, the darkness was like a substantial, physical presence, bearing down on him. Like something that could suffocate them. It was not their friend, and they were walking right through it...

Focus. Like Alex had taught him. To blind out anything that wasn't of use. This fear was irrational. The dread of the ground they walked on was not, but it was nothing he could influence. Kyle listened to the faint sounds of the others walking around him. Made a map of where they were in relation to him and the vehicles. Tried to identify as many of them as he could. Someone on the other side of his truck was starting to talk. The conversation was too quiet to make out more than a few words, but Kyle could identify the voices. Perry and Jackson. They sounded calm, unconcerned. Kyle managed to let go of some of the tension.

At least there was nothing around here anyone could trip over.

A loud noise broke the silence. A crack, like thick glass giving in to a great strain, and moving on like thunder. The noise was moving away, as if traveling on its own path across the ice, and that was when Kyle realized what this was. Ice, breaking. Someone yelled an order and then everyone was moving away from the trucks.

Kyle expected the driver to get out. He heard Perry's voice, telling her to do just that, but Rias stayed behind the wheel. Instead of abandoning the vehicle and getting to safety, she sped it up and disappeared into the dark before them. Kyle could he it crack again, like the sound was following her, then it was gone.

Silence fell again, but this time it lasted only for seconds. It was followed by agitated voices. Someone grabbed Kyle from behind, which he didn't appreciate, and pulled him further away from where the truck had been. Someone was cursing loudly. Perry was speaking into his radio, much louder now, trying to contact Rias. Kyle heard Diego's voice nearby, which meant that he _had_ left his truck. Even in this darkness, Kyle could tell that the other truck was still there, but it seemed like it was only a matter of time before it would disappear.

It didn't, though. Minutes passed and no one and nothing broke through the ice. The crack caused by the first truck hadn't reached the second one. It was still dangerous, but eventually Perry climbed into the driver's seat and restarted the engine. Everyone waited while he backed off a considerable way before he followed Rias in a wide curve, avoiding the area where the ice was damaged and going, possibly, even slower than before.

The wait was painful, because of the tension, and because of the cold. While they stood still it crept into their clothes, and despite his exhaustion and the fact that they might be walking over their own watery graves, Kyle was glad when Colonel Jackson herded them on. It was even more difficult this time, because their ropes had disappeared with the first truck, so the ones with night vision had to direct them by sound whenever someone strayed to far from the group. But at least that was distracting in a way.

Kyle had lost all sense of time, so he didn't know how much longer they walked before they reached the place where Rias had parked her truck. He just knew that it came sooner than expected, since he had somehow expected to keep going until the sun rose. Not that sunrise would make much difference, other that than they would be able to see the white desert that stretched before them. When they stopped, Kyle still could see next to nothing, although he had learned to identify the moving shadows around him as people. There was more talking now, which made that easier. By the time he reached the truck, the second one had already stopped beside it and most of the others had gathered around it. He had fallen back to the end of the group without even realizing it.

The ground lifted, telling him that, for the moment at least, they were off the ice. A bit away from him, he could hear Perry and Rias, engaged in a rather loud discussion. Apparently, Perry wasn't happy that she had ignored his orders, which could have cost her life. Rias countered that following his orders would have cost them the truck and that she knew what she was doing, and then there was an argument about priorities. It amazed Kyle that she would talk to their commander that way, but he understood that the two of them had known each other for a long time.

Everyone else was seeking shelter inside the trucks. They weren't notably warmer than the outside, but the absence of the wind, however slight, made a big difference, and they offered a place to sit down on a dry surface and rest. Kyle only realized how exhausted he was when he tried to climb up there and found that his limbs seemed to be made of lead.

In the camp he had felt like this all the time. He pressed his teeth together and mobilized his reserves for this last obstacle, but before he could make it, a large hand closed around his arm and pulled him the rest of the way up.

It reminded him of Julian, seconds before he died.

“Thank you,” he muttered, even as he moved away from the touch.

“Don't mention it.” Kyle recognized Captain Otts by his voice. “How's the shoulder?”

Kyle's shoulders, like the rest of his body, were numb with cold. “Not a problem for walking.”

“That's not what I meant.”

Kyle didn't quite get what the man meant, so he changed the topic.. “Do you know how much further we have to go, Sir?”

“Quite a while, though the worst if behind us. I guess you already figured that we are moving over ice.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Well, we're currently on a small island not far from the other side. The water isn't as deep here, and the ice might be thicker, so it won't be as dangerous, but we'll have to move slowly anyway. You know how ice can be.”

Kyle did not. He had never even _seen_ the kind of ice they were dealing with here, or a body of water bigger than a grown man was long. He only nodded, though, because he understood well enough anyway.

Perry showed up a minute later. They would rest here until dawn, he explained, and Kyle tried not to let it show how relieved he was to hear that. At the moment, he wasn't sure he could take another step. But then, it was a familiar feeling, and he knew very well that if the alternative was death, another step could always be taken. Not having to do that was very nice, though. Dividing big tasks into smaller portions with the opportunity to take a break in between was still a fairly new concept to him, but it was one he was quite fond of.

Even though it used to make him nervous. The first several weeks out of the camp he had always continued to do what he was told until someone actively told him to stop, and even then it had made him uncomfortable to laze about in front of all these people; like someone would call him out any moment and shoot him.

By now, breaks were almost something normal for him, but they were still a bit of a luxury for everyone, since sometimes there simply was no time or opportunity for rest. Right now there was not only the chance for it, but the need. Since the other side of this water was not too far away, Perry had decided to wait until they could all see before they moved on. Even if they left at dawn, they ought to be able to find shelter before the day had fully begun. So there were some hours to kill, as contrary to Kyle's impression they had not, in fact, walked all through the night yet, and getting some sleep was the most sensible time killer any of them knew.

There was food, too, of the dried and mostly tasteless variety. The ones who could see handed out a little bit to all of them, and only then did Kyle allow himself to feel how hungry he was. That was a mistake, as there wasn't nearly enough to not be hungry afterward. But that was a familiar sensation and easy to ignore. When he had finished eating he felt his way to the back of the truck where he stretched out beside someone else and soon had to move even closer to them when yet another one demanded space on his other side. At least there was some warmth this way. Kyle thought of Alex and Laina and the long nights in the tunnel as he closed his eyes, ready to fall asleep for as long as they would let him.

Sleep, however, wouldn't come. After walking for so long through the snow that seemed to hold him back and drag him down for hours and hours, he found that, though his feet ached and every muscle in his legs seemed to twitch, he couldn't bring himself to lie still. Whatever position he was in, his legs wanted to be in another one. There was no room to toss and turn until he found one that was bearable, and trying would only disturb the others, so Kyle tried to lie still and just ride it out, but his legs were driving him mad. It was as if after all the walking they had forgotten how to stop.

Eventually he gave up and separated from the warm pile of people. For a while he sat on the bench and looked out into the darkness, but even that was difficult now. Finally he climbed down and ended up in the snow again, walking aimlessly around the truck even though he knew that was a very stupid thing to do.

His path ended at the other truck. He was cold now, much colder even than he had been before. For a moment he considered climbing into this truck and trying the sleeping thing again, and while he did that he nearly collided with someone standing at the truck's back. The only thing that saved him from the collision was the fact that the man lit a cigarette just before it could happen and the light gave him away.

Kyle blinked at him. He should have noticed his presence, darkness or not. After a few seconds of blankness, his tired brain caught up and wanted to panic, because this kind of inattention got people killed.

The man didn't kill him. He just smoked. “What are you doing here, Private?” he asked. Kyle knew him, but right now couldn't remember his name. Carl? Claude? He was a Sergeant, around thirty, and always wore a faded red cloth tied around his arm for some reason.

He was also not happy with Kyle being here. His voice was sharp when he said, “I asked you a question,” after Kyle hadn't replied to it for apparently too long.

He still didn't reply. He couldn't think of anything to say. All he could think about was how odd it was to actually see someone smoke. Cigarettes were used as payment here, and even more so in the camp. No one ever seemed to consume them because what they could be traded for was more important, and that made them essentially useless. And yet everyone wanted them. Strange. Kyle had always thought so.

“Fuck you, Kid,” the man growled. “You got a problem?”

“No, Sir.” Kyle had plenty of problems right now, but it seemed a good thing to say here. Better than silence anyway, which was also odd, since the guy obviously wanted to be left alone.

“Well, you will if you don't fuck off right now!”

So this truck was out, then. Kyle didn't argue. He had learned long, long ago to stay way from people who didn't want him around and where bigger and stronger than him. The panic reared its ugly head again as he was taken back to that time where anyone who wanted to could hurt him without repercussions and was turning to run before he could remind himself that here it was different.

It was, wasn't it? If this guy wanted to kill him, here in the dark, would anyone actually care?

“Leave him alone, Scott,” another voice said, just in front of Kyle, and this time it came too late, sounded just when he was already colliding with the speaker. Fortunately, he didn't carry much momentum yet and neither of them even stumbled. Kyle turned around immediately, panic finally taking hold, and forgot how to breathe when a hand closed around his shoulder and stopped him.

“This isn't your truck,” the voice continued, as if that hadn't happened. Kyle didn't fight the hold, finally regaining some control and suddenly grateful for the darkness that hid his less than glorious reaction. “It's not your night. And it sure as hell isn't your snow. Anyone can walk around in it if they want.”

So they guy's name was Scott. Of course. Somehow Kyle had been stuck on C. And the person talking now was Sergeant Miranda Jones. She was about Scott's age and had been in the army about as long as Kyle had been alive. She'd given him and the other new ones some tips on how to better handle the kick of their firearms after they'd first joined them.

“Well, you can fuck off, too,” Scott replied. Apparently he hated everyone, not just Kyle in particular. “Bloody idiots.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Jones seemed comfortable to just ignore him. She turned to Kyle now, and he could just barely make out, from her outline, that she was wearing night goggles. So much for the cover of darkness. “He thinks we're morons for walking around when we could rest. He's right, of course. He's also an asshole. Thinks that whoever does walk around here must be doing it to annoy him. Which means he's drastically overestimating his own importance.”

The last words were obviously meant for Scott, but Scott just made an annoyed sound in response and walked off, around the truck.

“He must be afraid you're after his fags,” Miranda whispered conspiratorially at Kyle. Kyle felt his confusion grow. This entire scenario was rapidly slipping away from him and he was too exhausted to keep up with it.

“His what?”

“His cigarettes. Geeze, don't they teach you kids anything these days?”

Kyle thought the answer to that was pretty obvious. “No,” he said.

“Ah.” Miranda patted his back. “Right. Come on, I'll teach your something.” She didn't wait for a reply but climbed into the truck and Kyle, for lack of anything else to do, because she was his superior officer, and because he liked her better than Scott who was lurking around the truck somewhere, ready to take offense at his existence, followed.

They sat on the edge, their legs dangling above the snow, and Kyle felt his muscles twitch again, although it was easier to ignore now. The distraction helped. They had hardly settled when Miranda took off her goggles and handed them to Kyle. “Have you used these before?”

“Once.” Kyle slipped them on, as that was apparently what she wanted him to do. Nothing showed up before him until he found the right bottom at the side. Then his vision changed, but he still didn't see much. For a moment he wondered if the goggles were defective, but the simple truth was that there wasn't much to see.

He turned his head and saw Miranda, tinged in a greenish hue and looking pale and weird. Without any light there were no shadows on her face, making it look flat, unreal.

The snow showed no sign of their footsteps, ground and horizon were virtually indistinguishable, but the other truck was almost a shock to look at, so starkly it stood out. “You can adjust the contrast or set them to infrared,” Miranda explained and showed him how to do so. The infrared setting was unsettling, and not just because it turned everyone into people-shapes that seemed to be made of fire.

“That's how the machines see us?” he asked, staring at people he shouldn't have been able to see for the obstacles between them. There was despair in the realization. How could anyone possible hide from this?

“Yes,” Miranda confirmed. “But there's ways to fool them. Their heat sensors don't do crap for them when the environment is on fire, and the body heat can only be detected through certain surfaces. Our bunkers, for example, are generating a lot of heat, but they are deep enough underground that nothing shines through. And we found that many of the simpler machines had problems even recognizing humans like this. Some are programmed to shoot at everything that produces heat within a certain range, others are programmed to ignore everything that doesn't shoot, or talk, or do anything else obviously human. And their range isn't very big, especially that of the flying ones. If they are less than three hundred feet away, they can't see us.”

“Three hundred feet?” Kyle asked. He had heard people talk about a lot of feet before, but it just didn't make sense to him. Images appeared in his mind, of separated body parts ready to be skinned and his hands clenched.

“Sorry,” Miranda said. “My age is showing. Back in the day, distances were measured in feet, inches, yards and so on in this country.”

“Miles?” Kyle asked, because that was another one he had heard a lot.

“Exactly. Us pre-war people sometimes fall back on that out of habit, but generally we're using the metric system now because it makes more sense. Where I grew up we used that anyway, but it seemed that now everyone here does my brain is stuck on feet and miles. Anway. Three hundred feet are about a hundred meters,” she explained. “In case you have been wondering why we are going without light even though the machines could see us anyway.”

Kyle had been wondering that. He was also wondering why they were taking this route, had been ever since he'd realized how dangerous it really was. “How much time does going this way save?” he asked through teeth that were suddenly insisting on chattering.

“About three days. Four, considering the recent activity of killer bots on our original route.”

“That much?” Kyle had thought it would be one day, maybe two. Four seemed to justify this risk, if they really had to get somewhere fast.

He was no longer convinced it was an urgent mission that made them go this way. The barely sufficient meals they had been given for two days spoke of a shortness of supplies. Perhaps Perry wanted to get them back to base before they all starved.

He hesitated, then decided to ask Miranda about it. She was one of those who told them things, even the new ones. Not everything, but more than most. Now she did not disappoint him, confirming his suspicion.

“Why did no one tell me?” Was he the only one who hadn't known? Had he simply missed something?

“I suppose half of us old ones didn't think of that, and the other half didn't want you to worry. Those of us who have been here for a while know the deal, but with you new guys, I guess we just don't want you to worry about more than absolutely necessary.”

“That's why you didn't mention the ice?”

“Exactly. It can be pretty scary. At least with the machines, you can shoot at them, but here the ground itself can turn against you and that's it. If the thing with the truck hadn't happened, you'd never have known about the danger we were in.”

“I did know from the start,” Kyle informed her. “I mean, I guessed.” He hadn't really known about the danger, though.

“Ah. So that explains why you take it so well.” She sounded amused now. “Private Sommer was not exactly happy when he figured it out, what with keeping information from him and all. He sort of threw a tantrum at Ennis earlier, just because Ennis happened to be standing nearby. Something about us being patronizing and all. I'm surprised he even knows what that word means.”

Kyle did know what it meant, or at least he had a fairly good idea. And while he didn't think that acting that way towards a superior officer who had meant well was appropriate, he kind of understood where the other boy was coming from. “He feels like you don't accept him as a fellow soldier and think he can't take care of himself.” Kyle hadn't talked to Sommer much, but he knew he had grown up in a camp, too. He knew all about danger and survival, and yet it seemed like these people he was supposed to trust with his life were looking down on him anyway, just because he hadn't been in the army long.

“Ah, I guess.” Miranda crossed her arms behind the back of her head and leaned into them. “I suppose the age plays into it as well. You guys are young, and I think we just want to protect you as much as we can.”

“Don't.” The word was out of Kyle's mouth before he could stop it. Everyone who had ever tried to protect him was dead. He was still looking for a way to explain that it was neither necessary nor worth it when the sergeant reached out to ruffle his hair. He ducked away from the touch, even though he trusted her. That probably was an age thing, too.

He hoped he would live long enough to one day be taller than people.

“Aren't you tried?” Miranda asked.

Kyle shrugged. He was, but he wasn't sure that mattered when his body refused to rest. “Aren't you?”

“I am.” Miranda smiled when Kyle looked at her. The night vision made it look odd, ghostly. He took the goggles off and it was a little like the nights in the tunnel, sitting beside Alex, or Laina, or, for a precious, short time, beside both. “I just can't sleep,” the woman continued. “It's funny, but when I walk all day I just can't seem to stop. It's like my legs want to keep going, and it's driving me crazy.”

“Oh.” That was no explanation Kyle had expected. He had thought this ridiculous problem was something only he had to deal with. “It's the same for me,” he admitted. “I tried to sleep but I couldn't lie still, so I left because I didn't want to disturb the others.”

Miranda laughed softly. “You're too cute.”

Kyle didn't say anything because the words were nearly meaningless to him and he had no idea what to make of that.

“Don't worry, it gets easier eventually. Most people don't have the issue anymore after a few years of doing this. I guess I'm just lucky.”

That... sounded kind of horrible. Years. Great. At the same time, maybe it meant she thought he'd still be around in a few years. That would be nice.

“How do you make it through those years?” The question was genuine. “If you don't get to sleep between days this exhausting, how can you be up to fight when there's trouble?” Kyle already felt sluggish and dizzy. He knew from experience how much worse that would be after another day and night like this.

“Oh, I found that eventually you will just fall asleep, bloody legs be damned.”

Kyle thought about pointing out that their legs weren't bloody. At least his weren't. He didn't know about hers. Maybe they were. In that case she really should tell the field medic. But he didn't think they were. His thoughts drifted off.

  



	20. 2021 - 3/3

Movement woke him. It was the movement of people left and right of him getting up. Kyle mourned the loss of their warmth for a second or two until his brain caught up with the fact that he didn't know where he was and how he had gotten there. He sat up with a start, and found that he was in the back of the truck, where he had tried to sleep before. Had the night been a dream? He honestly couldn't tell. There was no time to think; he was too occupied getting up and acting like he knew what was going on.

When he tried to gather his equipment, he found that it wasn't where he remembered leaving it. A moment of panic later, he realized that he hadn't woken where he had lain down to sleep after all, but in the other truck. The one he remembered walking to in the dark. It hadn't been a dream then. Probably. Everything still felt fuzzy in his memory.

He wondered, as he hurried over to the right vehicle, how he had ended up where he was. He didn't remember crawling there. His memory ended somewhere in the middle of a conversation with Sergeant Jones.

His comm unit and weapons were hard to find. There were others roaming about, getting in his way, and while there was the faintest hint of light in the sky, it was still very dark. He didn't know how long he had slept. To him, the fact that he had slept at all was more than he had dared to hope for.

There was some food, and now that Kyle knew for a fact that they weren't given more because they were short on supplies, it seemed even less than before. They had lost their third truck a while ago, and by the look of it that one had carried most of their provisions.

Perry had told them once that it was important to not have everything in one truck, in case just this happened. There had been some food stored in the other ones, else this trip would have been even more miserable than it already was.

And yet, it wasn't so bad. They climbed onto the trucks and rode them until they reached the end of the island, eating mostly in silence. Not ten minutes later they got down again and started walking, spread out and wary. It was cold, but the wind had died. It was still dark but they could see enough now to not get lost. Kyle was tired, his feet were sore, but the pain was bearable, almost ignorable, and the exhaustion he felt was almost elating. Maybe, he thought, that was because it came from a long day of working towards a meaningful goal that did not serve the enemy.

Even though, for the moment, the goal was merely reaching the other side of this ice, and then a place where they could wait out the day. It was the bigger picture that counted here.

The rest of the way across the ice went by without incident. The day still hadn't fully started when they reached the other shore and got back into the trucks. This time, sitting was not an issue for Kyle. He leaned back and drifted, lack of sleep and exertion finally catching up with him. Every few minutes he opened his eyes, not feeling like he had slept but missing time. Every time it was a little bit brighter outside. On the other end of the truck he spotted Ferro at some point, slumped against the shoulder of a much taller soldier named Bellini. Her head bobbed softly with every bump in the road. Bellini also seemed to be asleep. Almost everyone was.

The next time Kyle woke up was when they stopped. He got out of the truck with everyone else, feeling disoriented and confused because it was much darker than the last time he had been awake, like he had slept away the entire day. Only when he jumped out and his feet hit tile did he realize that they were inside of a building.

Looking around he saw walls with big windows left and right, leading not to the outside but to other rooms too dark to give away their contents from this distance. Above them was a gallery, with more such windows and doors, and high above that a roof. Kyle identified the place as a shopping mall. He had been in one once before, on the way to his first mission. Now his heart leaped. His tiredness momentarily forgotten he started walking around the truck, taking in everything. These places fascinated him. They were relics from a lost world, and more than anything else they told the story of the life people had before the war, of what they had and what they wanted. The first time he had been to one, Kyle had spend an hour or two of precious resting time walking through the stores, looking at the few articles left on the shelf and trying to figure out their purpose.

More important, though, was the writing above the stores and on the billboards. It gave him a chance to practice his reading, which still wasn't very good, and an opportunity to learn new words if he could find someone to ask for their meaning.

He and some others had received some lessons in reading and writing during their training, so they would be able to read written orders and write reports, but there had been little time and opportunity yet to put those lessons to good use. A mall was great for that. Maybe he would even find one of those places full of books that one of the older ones had told him about – according to them, every mall had at least one, but the last one had been partially collapsed and the place with the book must have been on the other side of the rubble, or underneath it.

There was another ration of food, then everyone was advised to get rest, except for the ones who had to check over the trucks, the ones who had to keep watch, and the one who manned the communication unit to keep in contact with main command. Kyle was none of these people. He also wasn't in the group that was to check the mall for anything useful they could find, but he went exploring anyway. Not for long – he knew he needed more sleep, even if from now on there wouldn't be much more walking until they reached San Diego. But he wanted to have a look, try to decipher some of the signs (which was always hard, sometimes discouraging, because he couldn't always tell which of the confusing words he didn't understand because he didn't read them right or didn't know their meaning, and which he didn't understand because they _had_ no meaning), and maybe find some books.

No one stopped him. Which he took as a sign that it was okay to wander around. There was no one here but them, that much was already clear. Kyle only took one of his weapons out of habit. If he ran into a machine on his own, it probably wouldn't help him much, but he felt naked without it.

Most of the others indeed followed the advice to get rest, but some stayed up to smoke, stretch, look around. Check their weapons. Everyone was notably more relaxed than they had been on the ice. There were conversations again, but the voices were quite and faded into the distance as Kyle walked further away.

The air inside the mall smelled of dust. Dust covered the floor, the benches he passed. Many of the windows he passed were cracked or broken, and when he looked into the dark rooms behind them, he found nothing but empty racks and selves. This place had been looted a long time ago. The team send out for supplies wouldn't find any. And Kyle was aware that he probably wouldn't find any books around either, even if he did find the shop he was looking for. It was very cold. Paper burned.

Well, then he wouldn't have a reason to stay awake too long, he thought, trying to not be disappointed. He had known what he would find, after all. Malls were the first places looted after the war, he had been told, and that made sense. If people hadn't come here to take all this stuff, the machines did. Kyle thought about all the various, often unidentifiable goods that had been delivered to the camp, for him and the others to sort through. He thought about all the books and magazines that he hadn't been able to read then.

Now he finally had the skill and the time that he hadn't had before, but no books. The irony was not lost on him. There had been small libraries in some of the larger bunkers they had stopped in, but Kyle had been focused on other things then, and there had been very little time.

Book, reading, those things were simply not a priority. They weren't a priority now. Sleeps was. And yet Kyle had to try. For practice, but also because books held a certain fascination for him. They were full of information that he didn't have yet. They were full of stories he didn't know.

It didn't even matter all that much that a lot of the information was obsolete now, and that most of the stories weren't true.

Of course, there was that little issue that he wasn't a very good reader yet. Even if Kyle found no books here, he at least found words to practice with, even if they offered little by way of information. Whoever had looted this place of anything useable once had apparently found no use for the sighs above the stores or the advertising in the windows.

Advertising was another thing that fascinated and confused Kyle. Some of the older ones had explained to him what that was, but he wasn't quite sure he correctly understood the point. Reading a billboard barely visible through the dusty glass of some empty shop, he definitely didn't understand the message.

The inside of the mall was dim, but there was enough light to see and even read the signs. The glass ceiling was broken in places but mostly intact, making this place cold but protected from the wind that wasn't blowing at the moment anyway. It was domed, so most of the snow slid off it, otherwise it would have blocked the light, leaving the place pitch black, like the inside of the individual stores.

Other than poking his head in to check the status of the inventory, Kyle stayed out of them. He just wandered to the end of this section of the mall and then up one of the weird narrow staircases that had stairs that started flat, rapidly turned higher, and then flattened out again at the other end, which made it weird to walk on them as it messed with the sequence of his steps. Once he reached the gallery he walked it, choosing to go left at the stairs since he could hear the supply-seekers walk on the right side. He took in the signs about shoes, clothes, fashion – whatever that was, exactly – and food. There was a restaurant, which he knew was a place where people used to go to eat, but there was no hope of finding any food in there, so he didn't enter it. A board in front of the door was toppled over and covered in dust. Kyle brushed the dust away and was rewarded with a list of edible stuff he couldn't pronounce or connect to any kind of mental image.

At least here he knew it was the fault of the words and not of his lacking grasp of letters and the way they sometimes came together in ways that didn't make any frigging sense.

There were bones underneath the sign. Kyle had wondered about the lack of corpses, had simply assumed that maybe some people had stayed here for a while and had removed all the dead bodies that littered their shelter. Alternatively, the machines had been here. That was even more likely. Maybe Kyle had taken the clothes, or the skin, off people who had died here. The human bones half buried by the plastic sign may have been missed, or they belonged to someone who had died here after everyone else had already been taken.

Kyle left the bones untouched and moved on, wondering briefly how many more corpses might be hidden in the darkness behind the glass fronts. He decided to circle this gallery until he came across the next set of stairs and then return to the truck for a few hours of sleep. Maybe Perry would tell them something about their next mission soon. If they already had a new mission, other than getting provisions. Perhaps they would just go into the ruins of L.A. and fight any machine they could find. Kyle's thoughts turned to Julian and he focused his attention on the sign above the next shop to distract himself.

“Claude's Little Book Store” it read.

For a moment Kyle just looked at it. It felt strange to have actually found it; as if even standing here was a triumph even if there was nothing to find. The triumph mixed with the disappointment of finding that there really was nothing to find: the glass underneath the sign had been broken even though the door was wide open, and there was enough light to see that the shelves near the door were all empty. He had no doubt that it didn't look any better further in.

There was a low platform behind the shards of glass. Kyle supposed that books had been on display there once, like other goods were on display in other show windows. There were none now, only a few signs made of metal or plastic with words on them, most of them illegible.

There was one that caught Kyle's eye because it was not only words but a phrase, maybe even a sentence. It was hard to tell, since there was no punctuation, and it was written in cursive which was a problem for Kyle, who had learned to read with printed letters. This one looked so elegant in its curves, so plain yet complicated with its too many lines that he might not even have tried had it not been the only written thing around that actually seemed worth reading.

The first word was easy, even in cursive. He knew enough of the letters to guess the one that looked very different from the print version. The second word was much longer and one Kyle hadn't seen written before, although he knew it, and one of the difficult letters in it he had already deciphered in the first word, so he easily recognized it here. Two easy ones followed, then one that wasn't very long but hard. Kyle thought he could make sense of the letters, but he couldn't make sense of the _word_. It almost looked like a word he knew, but not quite, and its meaning escaped him even after he had made sense of the last three words that came after.

Having figured out all the words, Kyle soundlessly mouthed them, trying to figure out what they meant. It sounded like a sentence, but there seemed to be no point to it. Perhaps it made sense in a larger context, but there was no context here, and by the look of the board they were written on, there never had been.

It was just a pointless, empty line of words, and yet, as Kyle silently repeated them, they seemed to mean something anyway. Something he couldn't grasp but that was undeniably there, just barely outside the confines of his understanding.

His hand reached out, trailing his fingers over the writing and leaving traces in the dust as he mouthed the words again and wondered.

He noticed the other soldier step up to him but didn't pay any attention to him until he spoke.

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Captain Otts read aloud. He snorted softly. “Oddly fitting, don't you think?”

Kyle turned to look at him. “What does it mean?” he asked.

Otts scratched the back of his nose, shrugged. “I don't remember. It's from a poem. _The Waste_ _L_ _and_ , I think.”

“The wasteland?” Automatically, Kyle's eyes wandered down and to to the glass doors that led out to the snowy desert they had come from.

“Yeah. It's a famous one, by T.S. Eliot. I had to read it for school. Long as fuck.”

Kyle stared at him; the Captain's words made about as much sense to him as the line of the board. Otts stared back, frowning, until finally his face lit up in understanding. “Oh, right! _The Waste_ _L_ _and_ is the title of the poem. It has nothing to do with our wasteland out there. That didn't even exist when Eliot wrote that.”

That... didn't really help, actually. Kyle could hardly imagine anything that was not their wasteland, or that it had not existed at any point of remembered history. “What's a poem?” he asked.

Otts blinked, then sighed. “Oh well,” he sighed.

 

-

 

In his old life Otts had been an accountant. He had been a good accountant, and he had been educated and well read, but he had not been a teacher, and he'd never had to deal with people who so fundamentally lacked even the basics.

He'd had to deal with people who lacked the basics a lot since the war, but never with anyone who actually wanted to learn the basics. At least not when there had been no one else around to do the explaining.

The temptation to say “A form of literature” and then walk away as if that sufficed was great, but quickly dismissed. He and the other older ones tended to complain about the young ones not knowing anything of culture or history. They couldn't do that and then refuse to teach them when a young one actually asked.

' _Okay, start small_ ,' he thought to himself. “A poem is a form of literature,” he tried. Then he did not walk away but added, “A form of art, if you will. A bit like a painting, but with words instead of colors.” He didn't think that was very helpful. Not a teacher. And he didn't even know if Reese had ever seen a painting before or had an idea what art was. But the kid listened intently, and looked thoughtful rather than confused now, as if Gustav had just given him the key to the secrets of the universe.

Usually, if they talked to post-war children about art, the best reaction they could hope far was a snort. If it wasn't edible, flammable, or could be thrown at the enemy, it wasn't of interest. Gustav couldn't even blame them. It was funny how the priorities of an entire species could shift once everything had turned to ash.

“That's a poem?” Reese asked, looking at the board.

“That's a fragment of a poem. There are some that are very long, like this one in its entirety. Others are very short. Some rhyme, some tell a story, some just give you an impression of emotion.” Gustav sighed. “Basically, the difference between a poem and a short story is that in a poem the lines are shorter. Generally. They are like songs without the music. I'm really not good at explaining this.” Especially since the boy was lacking the frame of reference.

“Rhyme?”

“Oh dear. Let me think of an example.” An example was quickly found. Gustav was not a teacher, but his wife had been. She had taught literature, and she had loved poetry, and while he hadn't been able to keep her, he'd managed to keep the memory of some of the poems she'd loved.

“Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me,” he quoted. “The carriage held but just ourselves, and immortality.” Heather had had had thing for Emily Dickinson. Gustav hadn't actually appreciated those works all that much back then (in fact, he hadn't appreciated anything related to poetry much, besides maybe Shakespeare) but these days the idea that those works could be lost forever, that no one would ever care about them again the way Heather had, filled him with a sad kind of horror. So he collected whatever he could get his hands on, and he tried to remember. He finally got to see what his wife had seen in those verses, and wished he could tell her.

He'd come here in the hope that there might be anything left in this book store that he could take with him. Apparently the store had Eliot on offer when the world ended (not with a whimper but with a very loud bang), if the board with the quote was anything to go by. But poetry burned just as well as textbooks on chemistry did – which was another thing Gustav hoped someone was saving because those would come in handy if this war ever ended.

Reese looked at him in open fascination. Heather would be proud. Apparently there was still one kid left in this world to whom poetry did something, even if he barely knew what it _was_. Perhaps that was the secret – in school, there had been several works of poetry that Gustav had liked well enough until the class had spend hours upon hours taking them apart and analyzing them.

He considered asking Reese to explain, in his own words, what the poet said, and what she meant. His lips twitched, but he didn't. The joke would have been completely lost on the boy.

“That's just the first few lines,” Gustav explained. “The whole thing is a bit longer. I know a lot of random lines, but if you want to know more, you better stay alive until we're back in San Diego. I got a collection there.”

Reese's face lit up into something that was almost a smile. Come to think of it, that might have been the first one Gustav ever saw of the private's face. “What other lines do you know, Sir?”

Funny how the Sir made it sound like this was actually something of military importance. Gustav almost snickered. He'd have to tell Miranda about this, she'd love it.

“I'll try to think of some while we walk back,” he said. It was time to get back to the others anyway. Before they went, Gustav quickly shone this torch into the blackness of the store, but as expected, there was nothing left that had any value to them. It didn't seem to matter as much now, as he had actually found something better.

Of course, now he also had to keep his promise, and as always when someone asked him to pick from a large collection of quotes, he couldn't think of a single one. Eventually he settled for the first thing that came to his mind: Shakespeare. His old foe from English Literature class.

“Being your slave,” he began, “what could I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire. I have no precious time at all to spend, or services to do till you require.” That had always been one of his favorites and he actually knew the whole thing. He was about to continue when the noticed the look on the boy's face.

Okay, talking about being a slave to someone who had grown up in an extermination camp maybe hadn't been the smartest choice. Gustav mentally kicked himself. Way to ruin it. Reese simply didn't have the context to not get this one wrong.

“It's a poem about love,” the captain hastened to explain. “Basically, the poet says that his life is meaningless unless he can dedicate it to the person he loves.” He didn't say woman, because with Shakespeare, who could really know? “It's very romantic, and not very practical, I admit. The poets of old were all about love and romance.”

“Romance?” The kid sounded doubtful. Did he even know what that was? Romance had been pretty much eradicated from this planet, as far as Gustav could tell. There were no romantic places, nothing to use for romantic gestures, the best meal anyone could come up with was roasted rat, which remained roasted rat even if someone stuck a candle in it (which no one would do because candles were precious), and no time for any of that anyway. When Gustav came back from a mission and had a few hours or even days to spare, he wanted to spend those getting some fucking sleep, and preparing for the next trip.

Never mind the general lack of privacy.

Love, on the other hand, still existed. Of course it did. Even Gustav had loved again after losing Heather so long ago. But it was different now. Back in the day, love had been so important – movies, books, advertising, even the holidays, and social and familial expectations had put it firmly at the center of everyone's life. These days it was just something that existed in the background of their struggle for survival. It was nice – to have someone to care about, to come back to, and to fight and stay alive for. It gave existence a little more meaning. But it wasn't the be all and end all of things. That was battle. And in the end it was also dreadful, because people died, a lot, and losing someone beloved was so much harder than losing anyone else.

“You know about when you love someone?” Gustav tried. “Like, when you like someone better than others and are sad when they are not with you?”

Reese nodded. His face remained mostly impassive, so Gustav didn't quite get how he could suddenly look so sad. Maybe he was projecting. Everyone had lost someone they loved; this kid – an orphan, no doubt – certainly was no exception.

“Well, romance is, uh.” How to explain that to someone who had never seen a movie or read a book? It was times like this that made Gustav understand just how much they had lost, not just by way of comfort and entertainment. “It's when you dedicate your efforts to showing that person how special they are to you. I mean the really special kind of love here, not the way you feel for friends or your family but when you kind of want to be around someone all the time, and what to, uh....” Gustav trailed off. How old was this kid anyway? Twelve, thirteen? With the lack of privacy around he certainly knew about sex, but Gustav kind of doubted that he'd really get it.

“Well, romance was something we used to devote a lot of time to, when we were trying to win someone's affection or just wanted to have some sweet, relaxed, private time that was all about us.” You'll probably never experience that, he didn't say. “It's pretty much a thing of the past now. But poets wrote a lot about it. Sometimes when they were in love they wrote poems about their lovers, for their lovers. Like the one I just quoted. The man who wrote it was in love with some woman – or another man, I don't know – and used the poem to let them know how he felt. With rhymes.”

Reese nodded solemnly, looking thoughtful. Probably trying to figure it all out. Gustav needed to go through his mental inventory and pick out some poems that were not about romance, or even love, but about things someone born into this world could relate to without needing explanations. Like the futility of life, and the fact that the world sucked. There were enough poems on that, too.

“We should use the time we have left before nightfall to try and get some rest,” he said as they walked down the dead escalator and towards the trucks that were parked in the middle of the wide space beside the store fronts. “Get some sleep and I'll have some more poems for you when you wake up. Who knows, I might even get one or two together in their entirety.” He winked at Reese, who gave a short nod, all business, and straightened the strap on which the semi-automatic hang from his shoulder. It was this that reminded Gustav painfully that he was not actually dealing with a child here, whom he promised ice cream if only he was good and went to sleep on time.

They separated when they reached the others. Reese retreated to his truck, where hopefully he would curl up on top of the others sleeping inside and be out until nightfall. Gustav intended to do the same soon. First he went to where a restroom used to be and relieved himself into a toilet that would never be flushed again, happy that they wouldn't be here long enough for this thing to be full. When he returned, his eyes met those of his commanding officer, who just now was climbing out of the cockpit of one of the trucks.

Perry's eyes were bloodshot, speaking of sleep deprivation and worry. He should take his own advice and get some sleep, but Gustav knew there was no point in telling him. Maybe he should tell Andrew instead. The man had some talent for making Perry do things.

“I assume your search for supplies was fruitless,” the commander remarked, a hint of sarcasm in his voice. They had not been prohibited from leaving the camp, just the mall, but it was still frowned upon.

“No fruits were found, Sir,” Gustav replied truthfully. He could tell that had been the wrong thing to say the moment he did. Perry was usually pretty easygoing outside of missions, but now his eyes narrowed in irritation.

“I see,” he said. “Well, since you seem to have so much energy left, why don't you go and help the ones actually send out to search for supplies sort through their findings?”

 _'Because I am pretty sure they didn't actually find anything,'_ Gustav thought. He didn't say it, though. He said, “As you wish, Sir,” and buggered off in the direction of the supply truck, where one single person of the team in question was fiddling with one of the storage compartments under the benches.

Pickings had indeed been slim, if one person could handle them on her own – with one hand, no less. Rather than putting anything into storage, Captain Naya Rhodes seemed to be searing for something, and the lid of the compartment kept falling down on her. Gustav held it up for her and she thanked him without looking up, until finally she found what she was looking for.

It was a battery for her torch, apparently. After Gustav had closed the bench again, Naya sat down and held the torch between her knees, to screw it open with her one hand. “We're running out of these,” she said grimly. “Even though we hardly had the chance to use them.”

“We didn't have a lot to begin with,” Gustav pointed out. “I take it your supply run was unsuccessful?”

“We found a bunch of hand towels, a pocket knife, and a can of oil in a box inside a refrigerator.” Naya pointed into the shadow of the truck, where Gustav could make out a pile of stuff just before the feet of someone who had stretched out to sleep on the bench.

“I'm impressed,” he stated. “Do you need me to help you organize that? I pissed off Perry and he ordered me to be useful.”

“Then screw this shut,” Naya ordered and handed him the torch. Gustav screwed it as told, making sure to have the end piece secure enough, but not so tight that Naya couldn't get it off again with one hand. “I met him just before you showed up,” she said, tucking a strand of her short black hair back underneath her headband. “He wasn't happy with you and Reese running around up there, but mostly I think that's because he's not happy right now, period. Our supply situation is pretty tight, and we just received word that the highway into San Diego is blocked. We'll lose a day.”

“Can we afford to lose a day?”

“We'll have to. It'll be uncomfortable, but it's not like anyone here is not used to being hungry. Just hope we won't run into trouble while we're all down with hunger pains, and try not to annoy Justin while you're at it, or he'll find a better punishment next time.”

“I always hope we don't run into trouble. The punishment, though, that shouldn't be an issue. We didn't do anything we had been ordered not to do. Now, I don't mind, but I'm glad Reese wasn't with me when I met the boss.” The more Gustav thought about it, the more uncomfortable he felt. To Gustav, this petty task he had been given in reaction to some stupid command was something he'd take in stride, knowing better than to take it personally. Reese, though, was only just learning the rules here, and with a past like his, getting punished for something this harmless that hadn't even been forbidden could have done a hell of a lot of damage.

Naya gave him a long look. The shadows beneath her dark eyes let them seem even larger than they were. “He's stressed. He's not an asshole, and he knows his men. So you get it, the kid doesn't. If he had been with you, you would have been spared this.”

“Spared this,” Gustav echoed. “What, helping you with the flash light? Yeah, poor me.”

“Lucky you. The flash light is all finished. You can go to sleep now.”

“And I will.” They got up at the same time. Naya jumped of the truck and walked across the mall until she disappeared behind the other truck. Gustav watched her go, her heavy boots dragging over the tile, tiredness taking the last bit of grace out of her movements.

 _'I grant, I never saw a goddess go,'_ he thought, a small smile on his lips, as he turned away to look for a spot to sleep.

 

-

 

Naya was one of the last to sleep and one of the first to wake up. That wasn't unusual for her. While she had been tired to the bone and harboring the intention to turn in as soon as possible, various things, kept her awake. She'd always thought of something else that she could check or take care of – all tasks that wouldn't take long, so she'd decided to quickly do them before she lay down, and then hours had passed and she was still up and doing things.

It was a bit like in her early, early childhood, before the war. She hadn't been in school for long when the bombs fell and drastically shortened her education, but she remembered that even before she was able to read them, she had loved her older sister's comic books about horses, and once she was able to make sense of the words and the story, she would secretly stay up reading them, always telling herself she would go to sleep after just another page, another story.

Later, in the camp of survivors where she had met Justin, Mildred and the others, she had stayed awake too long many a night talking to Aaron, then Jessie and Tyson, now all dead and gone. But back then, there had been nothing much to do all day but be afraid and sad, and looking back Naya was certain that those long talks with other children – about the people they had lost, about their situation, but also about random things like their least favorite subjects in school or movies they liked – as well as the need to look out for the younger kids had helped her cope with the situation and the loss better than anything else could have. So those were waking hours well spend. It was certainly better than the lives those who slept all the time, day and night, incapable of facing the world until they got sick and died or just killed themselves.

Although there had been times when that had been tempting, too.

Then she had left with Justin's group, had grown closer to the others only to lose half of them before they even found Connor and his army. Those days she had not stayed awake at night, exhaustion bearing down on her and pressing everything, even her grief, into a soft mush that seeped into her bones. Purpose had kept her going. When she'd been a child, her teenage years had held the promise of wonderful and exciting things, like dating, high school, learning to drive. Instead she became a soldier, and her adolescence came and went in a blur of fear, injuries, grief, and ever-changing environments as places, like people, were lost. The long nights came back again, though, despite the exhaustion. She had spend many of them talking with Aaron, with Jessie when she had still been there, and together they had nourished their hatred for the machines and their determination to take them out.

There had been times, sitting in the dim bunkers during the daytime hours after a hard-won victory, when they felt invincible, and this war had seemed like something that would end. When Aaron had been killed, randomly and pointlessly, there had been no one around to talk to and the grief that had saturated her bones like an unseen, unacknowledged part of her life, had risen up through her throat and nearly suffocated her. For a while, even breathing became a conscious effort. Suddenly she had understood why some people just lay down and didn't do anything, not even end it: it was because even suicide required energy that had been taken from them.

It had been a technical understanding. Naya hadn't wanted to die. But for the first time she had also not wanted to live.

It had been Justin, Mildred, and finally Miranda – a woman who had barely even known Aaron – who had helped her out of that in the end. Although Justin wasn't that much older than her, when she'd met him as a teenager, the age difference had seemed enormous, like the difference between adult and child. Somehow, the younger ones of their group had always stuck together, and while they knew the others would be there for them, Justin being their commander had always left him so busy that bothering him with her issues and loss hadn't seemed worth it. Naya had forgotten over that that they had suffered the same losses, the same grief.

Miranda had been a surprise. Another thing Naya had forgotten was that there where new people around that could be her friends if she let them. The ones who were with her when she joined the army were still special to her, though. She thought of them as her family, almost. Losing Jessica had been like losing another sister, losing Aaron had cost her her brother – the twins, they used to call them, despite the fact that they weren't related by blood. It had been Justin reaching out to her that had given her the strength to accept comfort from other people as well.

Now it was Justin who woke her from her slumber, or rather, the thought of him did. When Naya had retreated he had still been up, listening to the comms. She knew he was worried and didn't get much rest, but she also knew that he needed it and wondered if he had been smart enough to leave the comms and the watch to someone else and go to sleep. Once awareness returned it were these thoughts that kept Naya from sinking back into sleep, but then, if it hadn't been this, it would have been something else, or the phantom pain in her missing arm that still plagued her from time to time. She hadn't been able to sleep much for years, and didn't need it, even if sometimes she thought it would be nice.

The light outside the truck had changed in the hours she had been asleep. It was dimmer now, the sun sinking behind the clouds. Not much longer and they would all be woken up to prepare and leave, making use of as much of the night as possible. Justin would probably push it now that the direct way was blocked, leaving just that little bit too early, stopping that little bit too late to be safe. She sighed. The next three days would be fun.

She would prefer an honest fight over this race against starvation any day.

Miranda didn't stir when Naya pushed herself up. Being among the last to come here to sleep, they were at the foot end of things, and Mira was lying on her side, curled around that new kid, Reese, whom she held close like a giant teddy bear. Asleep like this he looked like a child, which reminded Naya that he was. She didn't feel sorry for him having to fight in a war at this age, having been no older herself when she first picked up a weapon. She did, however, feel some regret.

Mira, too, looked younger in sleep, but also more worn, somehow. Now, without the keen awareness that usually animated her face, she looked exhausted and vulnerable. The mask was missing. Miranda was one of the people that made everyone feel a little better, a little more hopeful with their boundless optimism. In moments like this, Naya worried.

She bend down to press a soft kiss to the other woman's temple, then got up and out of the truck. A quick visit to the bathroom later, she approached the driver's cabin to see who was in there. It was Mildred. That wasn't really a surprise.

“Have you slept at all?” Naya asked. Mildred made a vague gesture.

“Some,” she said around around her ever-present spoon. Whatever that meant for her. As long as Naya had known her, Mildred had never been one to sleep much. As long as she had a few hours of quiet and a cup of coffee, she was happy.

Mildred was the oldest one from their original group. A cloth was tied over the missing eye and her long hair showed more gray than black now, but other than that, the sniper hadn't changed much. Naya ran her hand through her own short hair. She had liked it better long, but long hair was a pain to deal with with one hand.

“Seen the boss?”

Mildred made gesture to the other side of her. Naya climbed up the step to the cabin and leaned in to see what was going on. What she found was the other seat flipped all the way back, and Justin lying on it, firmly entwined with Andrew and fast asleep. Andrew wasn't. He opened his eyes when Naya leaned over and shook his head barely perceptibly. Naya nodded and climbed down again.

“I guess we won't be leaving yet,” she noted quietly.

“Thirty minutes,” Mildred suggested. That would be thirty minutes before everyone had to get up. Long enough.

Around them, people began to stir, but most of the ones asleep now would determinately remain so until someone forced them to stop. It was almost peaceful here, right now. Someone was snoring softly nearby. Someone had heated up water on their portable gas cooker and poured a can of coffee that people would start to fight over soon enough. The smell penetrated the smell of the dust and ash that hung in the air, and in the fading light the desolate decay of the mall had a certain beauty, like an old, romantic painting of ruins.

Naya climbed into the truck she had come from to get ready while she was mostly alone. The ride would be hard – boring, but tense. The worst kind boredom. On top of that, everyone would be hungry – very hungry. She thought about checking with Ennio how much food they would all be gifted with this beautiful evening, but then decided against it, not wanting to ruin the surprise.

Naya went through the bag with the change of clothes and decided that it was time for new underwear, but new socks could wait, if only because she didn't want to deal with actually having to take off her booths. She changed where she was, hurrying because now that the warmth of the pile of bodies she had slept in left her she was beginning to feel the cold of this hall. She was pulling her coat back on when she noticed Reese sitting behind her.

He had taken off his boots and was right now investigating a hole in his sock. Naya reached into the supply box and threw him a rolled up pair. “Take these,” she ordered. “We have enough.” Even if they couldn't eat them. Wouldn't that be nice?

Come to think of it, no, it wouldn't.

Reese took the socks and pulled them over the pair he was already wearing. Then be put on his boots and then he stared at her.

Naya frowned at him, irritated. His attention seemed to be on the empty sleeve of her coat where the arm ended just beneath the elbow as if he had never seen that before, and she didn't like it, because it reminded her that there was, in fact, nothing there.

Losing her friends and family had eventually pushed her into a deep hole of depression that she had only been able to crawl out with help. Losing her arm had made her _angry_. She couldn't remember ever having felt such an anger before. If was as if a line had been crossed with that. She had hated the machines before, but never before had she felt such rage whenever she thought of them. Especially in the early days, when Justin and the others had left her behind at the base as they left for their next assignment and it had looked like she would never be able to join them on the battlefield again.

Ennio had called her lucky for that. She had punched him in the face just to show that she still could. It wasn't a typical reaction for her, but at that moment she hadn't given a fuck. If anything, she had been distantly happy that there was finally something for her to punch. Justin, who didn't tolerate any violence among his men, hadn't come to chew her out, and she hadn't known if that was because Ennio hadn't told on her, or because Justin no longer considered her one of his men.

“What?” she growled now. “You got any problem, Private?” She was pulling her weight, wasn't she? In fact, several of these people around wouldn't be around without her. _You're welcome, Guys. I don't need two hands to pull a trigger._

He looked started. And then confused. “No, Sir,” he said. And didn't even stop staring, that rude little asshole, only now he was staring at her face. Like he didn't even see the problem. “I'm just glad you're not dead.”

Now it was on Naya to stare in confusion, but Reese, having said his piece, was already busy checking his equipment and then getting out of the way of someone coming out from the back. Naya finally got it after half a minute, and her irritation evaporated to be replaced by another kind of anger. He came from a place were injuries were a death sentence, so he was probably really just expressing his appreciation of the fact that losing her arm hadn't led to her getting shot in the head. And of course he didn't get why his open fascination irritated her. He had no social skills at all, no idea what was appropriate to say or do and what wasn't. She had seen that before in other people, though most weren't quite so... innocent about it.

The kid stalked off to take care of other business, and came back a few minutes later. By that time, Miranda was awake and getting ready. Reese turned to her now, probably because she was more approachable and hadn't snapped at him lately.

“Sir,” he started. “Can you teach me how to be a better sniper?”

Miranda raised her eyebrows. “Good evening to you, too. Where's this coming from?”

“I need to be better with the rifle,” the boy said earnestly. “In Del Mar, when the big H.K. attacked, I missed his weak spot and it would have killed us if I hadn't found a larger target. That was luck. It won't happen next time. So I need to be better.”

He said that very matter-of-factly. There was a skill he has lacking. That might become a problem at some point, so it needed to be fixed. Naya shook her head, wondering if this single-minded focus the kid had on being a good, useful soldier, was a good thing.

“Good point,” Miranda admitted. “But I'm not really the best one to ask. Colonel Rias is the best sniper we have, and she's a good teacher if you get her on a good day.”

“Commander Perry send me to you,” Reese stated. He sounded a little questioning, looking over to where Mildred was getting out of the cabin to make room for Gustav.

“Well, I can teach you the basics, when are back at the base. If that's not enough, ask Rias to give you some tips.”

Reese nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

“Don't thank me yet, I'm not that great myself. And keep in mind that not everyone can be a remarkable sharp shooter. Chances are you're never going to be able to hit a target that's small and moving much better than you are now.”

Again, Reese nodded his understanding. “What do I do if I won't be?”

Naya snorted. “You improvise and find a way around your handicap, or you die.” There, that simple. “Don't worry,” she added, softening her voice. “If you need one, a sniper will be with you. If the sniper is lost, or the enemy takes you by surprise, you'll do fine anyway. You did well with that H.K.. Good thinking.”

“That was luck,” Reese pointed out. “The panel at the back was still open.”

“Still. Not everyone would have seen that. If you absolutely can't find anything to shoot at that won't get you killed, don't shoot at all and let it go.”

“But what if it'll move on and kill others if I don't stop it,” he protested.

Miranda sighed. “You can't plan for every eventuality, have a plan to defeat every enemy. Why do you think so many of us die? If bad comes to worse, you save whoever you can, even if that's only yourself. If you attacking your enemy will just lead to it killing you and moving on to kill the others you wanted to protect, there wouldn't be any point to your sacrifice. All you need to learn there is assessing when the cause is lost, and when there is enough of a chance to risk it.” She leaned forward and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. “But that I can't teach you. Only experience can.”

“Getting it wrong once can put an early end to that, though,” Naya pointed out and Miranda glared at her.

Reese looked thoughtful. But not convinced.

“Turning away from your comrades and friends can be the hardest thing, and many of my own friend had died because they couldn't,” Naya told him. “I'm not sure that is something you can learn. Keeping the bigger picture in mind helps, though. Being aware that if your die with someone else, they will be just as dead as they would be if you hadn't. And if you are dead, more people might die because you won't be there to have their back.”

“Even Sarah Connor has left people to die when she had to,” Miranda added.

Reese looked at her. “Connor's mother?”

“Yeah. Though as nails, that woman. And you know, if she hadn't done that, she would have died and couldn't have trained him and now we would all be lost. Or John would have died and we'd all be lost. So save yourself when you have to, kid.” Mira leaned over to ruffle his uncut, dirty hair. “You never know, it might save mankind one day.”

Reese ducked his head, but he didn't get angry, as Sommer had the one time Mira had done this to him, nor did he pull away, though Naya got the impression that he would have liked to. Mira had mercy on him after a few seconds.

Andrew showed up a minute later to tell everyone to get their asses up into the trucks; they would leave in a moment. Breakfast would be served on the way – Naya mentally prepared herself for nibbling on it to make it last; maybe she could fool her stomach into thinking there was enough to last that long.

Reese took a seat further down the truck. He ended up beside Ferro, who leaned over to quietly say something to him that Naya didn't catch, and with their serious, almost grim expression the two didn't look like children at all. The looked just like all the other soldiers in here, only smaller.

When Naya turned back to Miranda, the other woman was also watching the kids, her lips moving as she whispered words to herself. Naya couldn't catch everything, but she caught the “Please, God,” that started it.

Naya snorted softly. “I don't think prayers are going to help.”

“Of course you don't. You don't believe in God.”

“I don't believe in _your_ God,” Naya corrected her, offended. For all that Miranda was awesome, the woman could be an insensitive ass. “That's a big difference.”

“Only to you, Baby.” Mira winked to show she was joking, but Naya kept her frown firmly in place. She was annoyed, because she _did_ believe in God. She just didn't think God – anyone's God, for that matter – would descent from Heaven to help them here.

She did, however, envy the people who still did. Those who thought there was a purpose to their suffering, a reason for all this beyond a glitch in some computer's programming. “What are you praying for?” she asked.

“I pray that Kyle won't bite it,” Miranda answered. “He'd kind of adorable.”

Naya snorted. But she didn't say anything. Reese _was_ kind of adorable, with his earnest intensity and complete lack of ego. She tried not to hope for anyone's survival in particular, though – ever. The superstitious part of her felt like every time she did, her hopes were like a giant arrow pointing at that person, that glowed in the dark and said, “This one next!”

Maybe _she_ would be next. In that case, she wouldn't have to worry anymore.

The truck started moving. Naya leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to think of some non-depressing topic to keep her mind occupied through this long, dark night.

A few miles later she said, without opening her eyes, “I pray every day that I'll get to see the sun again.”

This time it was Miranda who didn't reply.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line _I grant, I never saw a goddess go_ is from a Shakespeare sonnett.


	21. 2023 - 1/3

At some point, sometime in the past five years, her father had grown old. That was the thing that Kate couldn't keep from thinking, over and over again. Every time she had seen him since the war, since he had become John's General of the North, she had thought how he looked worn, tired, how this life was draining him like it was draining everyone else. Now, for the first time, she thought he looked old.

Perhaps that was because of her, though, not because of him. For the longest time she had felt like a child again in the rare moments when she was with him. Now she looked at him no longer with the eyes of girl, but with those of an adult. She was pushing forty, had three children of her own. She had taught herself how to be a doctor, had trained others in it, had grown into running a civilization underground and on next to nothing, had lost more people and places than she'd ever dare to count. And he had been there for none of it.

Through no fault of his own. And yet there were times when all Kate felt when she thought of him was bitterness.

Not often, though. And not today. Today she felt worry, because he looked old, and she became aware that he was well into his sixties and still spending most of his days on the battlefield. And she felt amazed, because she got to see him as an old man and a part of her had not expected that to ever happen.

She also felt love, and pride, as he sat on the bed of her family's room in the head quarters of the army and got to meet his grandson for the first time.

Casey, who had been born in April of 2020 and was nearly three years old now, had been playing on the floor with some sticks and blocks that had turned special only through the power of his imagination and had largely ignored the stranger in their room at first. He was used to strangers, since he mostly grew up attached to his mother's hip whereever she went, or dragged around by his sisters, who also spend all day outside in the bunker where soldiers and new refugees came and went. His way of dealing with that was to either ignore them or pretend he had known them all along and they were no big deal. Sometimes people got emotional at the sight of a child this young as they were kind of rare, especially to those who came in from the wasteland, but most people reacted to him by ignoring him right back.

Robert Brewster had won him over by paying attention to him, even playing with him for a bit in a way Kate wished she remembered from her own childhood, but really only remembered from her brother's. In the five minutes her father had been home through it, anyway.

Eventually Casey retreated to the other end of the bed to build a fort out of pillows and then fall asleep on them. Kate thought about how this was a moment – her child asleep and watched over by someone else – that normally she would use to take care of something in the parts of the bunker she didn't want to take him to, or to saw off someone's limp in medical, if there were any limps that needed sawing off. (There weren't, but there was an appendix that needed to be taken out. Giselle was taking care of that, though. Kate had the afternoon off and it felt so wrong.)

When her father finally turned to her, sorrow was etched into his face. “I'm sorry, Katie. For leaving you alone with all this.”

“I'm not alone,” she assured him. “John is sometimes here, too.”

Her father gave her a long look that didn't make him look any happier. Kate sighed. “To be fair, I'm only sometimes here myself. Mostly, my kids are raising themselves.”

She sounded bristly, she knew. Caustic. She didn't want to, but somehow she couldn't help herself. This was the first time she had seen her father in years and it might well be the last time she ever saw him, and she wished she could be happier. She _was_ happy. But somehow the fact that this moment was special pulled on something in her that constantly reminded her how it shouldn't be. And all the things that were wrong with this picture.

“I never wanted this life for you,” her father told her what she already knew. “When this all started, when John send me north, I had hoped against hope that all this would be over before you turned twenty.”

Kate made a dismissive gesture, her voice light. “If it's any consolation, I never wanted this life for my children either,” she said with a smile. How nice it was to have something in common.

“Katie,” her father said, and nothing more. As if just that would be enough for her to break down and tell him all her troubles. About how terrified she was that her children would be killed, how worried she was about John, and how angry about all the secrets he was keeping from her when they had been in this together from the start. How she sometimes felt like this war would never end and they would live like this forever and ever and ever, with hope just a baseless promise that kept them from making peace with the inevitable.

How glad she was that her kids had never known the world outside the way it had been and how much she despaired over the fact that they never would. (All these hours, days, week, years underground were wearing on her, driving her mad, until she felt like her skin was made out of molasses and every breath was poison, and it was driving her mad when she let it, so mad, like she would literally go insane if it didn't stop. Like only tearing her skin off her body would offer some relief. Finally, a week ago, she given in and gone outside, during the day even, needing the sky, fresh air, the open. And out there she had seen the endless, gray clouds that were always, always there. That had been there the last time she was outside, and the time before, and before, and before, and that would be there when she got out next, no matter how long that would take. In the end she had buried her face in her hands and let her body be whacked by soundless sobs. Then she had stayed outside until she could no longer bear the cold.)

“I'm fine,” she said, instead of all the things she would never say in the presence of her child. “And it's okay. Keeping me company is hardly worth the lives of the people you have saved up there.” She smiled again. “I'm proud of you, you know.” And while the smile was forced, the words were actually the truth.

Her father smiled in response, looking glad and sad at the same time. There was always some sadness in everything. He reached out and took her had, like he would once have taken her into his arms. “I saw a lot of sick people coming in,” he changed the topic. “Is everything alright here?”

“It's the lack of sun, and of proper food,” she told him. Didn't say how sick she was of seeing people die. “What we have can't make up for the things we are lacking, so people get sick. We do what we can but there's really not much we can do about it.” Li had died last year of something that had started as a normal cold. Hank and Giselle were now taking care of her children. They would take care of Casey, too, if anything happened to Kate before he was old enough to take care of himself.

Her father nodded. “I had feared as much. I've seen it all over the place, for years. We're not meant to be like this.”

“The soldiers are less vulnerable to it,” Kate said. “They are, on the average, less fragile in their health, and I guess that's because they are out more. Even if the sun is always covered and they mostly move at night. We're just not indoor creatures. Some of the people here have not seen the outside since we established this base.”

“So take them outside,” Dad suggested, as if it were that easy. “The machines don't come this far out anymore. John has this area secured.”

“Mostly secured,” Kate corrected. “You never know when one slips through, sees us, manages to destroy the bunker. The more people are outside, the higher the risk of that happening.”

“It's a risk,” her father admitted. “But it's not a very big risk. I'm not suggesting to create a village on top of this place. Just small groups getting out for an hour or so every now and then. That should be better than everyone wasting away down here, don't you think?”

The truth was, Kate _did_ think so. Not long ago she had started to organize such trips outside even for those who weren't soldiers and who had nothing to do with getting in supplies from the ruins or trading with the scavenger-camps that were within reachable distance. And it had failed spectacularly. Yes, those groups existed, yes, she got some people outside for a while, once in a while. But the broad majority of the inhabitants of this bunker had refused to set foot outside if they didn't have to. Outside meant machines, it meant cold and starvation. As if they thought once outside they wouldn't be allowed back in anymore, and that the machines were everywhere. Everyone was traumatized in some way, and some had outright panic attacks at the idea of leaving the safety of these walls.

A few had jumped at the chance to get out, and some of them had still jumped at it the second time. Kate wondered if those who had decided to keep it a one time thing had had the same reaction to the sky as her and couldn't bear to face it again.

Maybe they had just forgotten how lousy cold it was on the surface. The bunker was by no means cozy, but their first excursion had fallen on a particularly freezing day.

Either way, on the whole, Kate's plan had failed. And she didn't even know if the few hours of pale sunlight a week really made a difference in the long run.

She sighed, and told her father of this. She was responsible for these people and apart from making sure the food was fairly distributed, sewing shut their wounds and occasionally putting them out of their misery, there was so little she could do for them. “I need this war to be over,” she said. “But I know that even if that ever happens, the world will still be a shithole.”

“Language,” Dad warned her, and Kate couldn't help it. She giggled. She giggled because that was such a ridiculous thing to focus on amongst all this disaster, and because she was cursing, a lot and aloud, every day, so the fact that he bothered to object reminded her how little he knew of her now. And also because she said the same thing every time one of her kids used words like that.

It ended with her father taking her in his arms after all and her leaning against him, and for a while they just watched Casey as he slept, oblivious to what a terrible place this world really was. To him, these wall truly were safe still.

“So, Casey,” Dad finally said. “What's up with that name? I get Louisa and Jeanette, but where does this one come from? John's family, I suppose?” He gently poked her side. “And here I'd been hoping to meet a Bobby Junior when I see you next.”

“We only take middle names for our kids,” Kate pointed out. “And since you don't have one, you're out.” She didn't mention that Lily Louisa Brewster and Sarah Jeanette Connor were both dead and that she had felt it would be tempting fate to name their third child after someone still alive. “It's actually spelled just with a K and a C,” she explained, and waited for the penny to drop.

It took a moment, but eventually he said, slowly, “C. As in Charles?”

“Yeah. We wanted to keep up the naming after our family, but neither you nor John's father have a middle name, and besides, he never knew his dad, so he didn't know if that was someone he wanted to name a kid after. On the other hand, the guy is dead and his mother loved him, so John didn't want to leave him out entirely. So we got C for my brother, and K from his father's name.”

“Which would be? John has never actually mentioned it.”

“It's Karl,” Kate informed him. “I didn't know that either, before Casey was born and we had to come up with something.” The fact that those letters could be turned into a normal name had had something to do with the choice. In fact, Kate had been surprised when she had come back to her clinic days after the difficult birth, had sorted through the paperwork on what had happened while she was out, and found that John actually had it spelled K.C. on the birth certificate.

At least he hadn't written the names out in full. Either way they put it, Karl Charles sounded just as bad a Charles Karl.

“Kid's lucky it wasn't Carl with a C,” her father remarked, and Kate silently agreed.

Casey smiled in his sleep for a second. Kate loved him with all her heart. There were times, moments that she would never mention to anyone, when she loved him best of all her children, because it was easiest.

No, that wasn't quite true. She didn't love him more than Jeannie or Lou, but her love for him was purer at this point, not yet mixed and overshadowed by anger and worries. Her daughters were old enough to cause her grief, and a lot of it. Casey would get there soon enough, but right now he was just her carefree baby who smiled in his sleep and thought she could keep protect him.

“What about his sisters?” Dad asked her as if he'd read he mind. “I haven't seen them yet. Is Jeannie still being difficult?”

“She is,” Kate confirmed. “But it's not as bad now. I said something to her, once, that got her to think, apparently. She's trying harder to be reliable and that really helps, but I know she's just doing it to show us she's able to follow orders so we will let her join the army.” She ran a hand through her hair. There was some gray in it already. Her father wasn't the only one who was getting old. “She's thirteen now. Almost fourteen. Old enough by our rules. And I know people are talking – people whose own children have enlisted at that age, or younger. And I know we need everyone to fight the machines, and she'd probably be really good at it, but I can't...”

“You can't bear the thought of her getting hurt out there, or of sitting here while she's gone, not knowing if she's alright, or if someone's going to express their regret the next time she should be coming home,” her father finished for her when she trailed off.

“Yeah. Like all the other parents, who let their children go anyway.”

“To be fair, most parents don't. Think about it – barely any child here still has both mother and father. Those kids who join at the youngest possible age are all orphans. And the others usually only have one parent left, who's in the military themselves and hardly ever with their kids. So the army is giving those kids somewhere to go where they are taken care of.”

“Until something shoots them or bows them up.”

“Which is why those parents who get to take care of their own kids are as reluctant to let them go as you are.”

Kate had known that, but hearing it helped anyway. A little bit. She still felt like she was abusing her status in this society to keep her own children safe while sacrificing anyone else. “Of course Jeannie expects immediate reward for her good behavior,” she said. “So if she's done as she was told for a while and we still don't let her enlist, she decides that we're just making a fool of her and it's right back to the beginning.”

“What about Lou?”

“Lou is a blessing most of the time. She's always taking care of her brother when I ask her to, even takes him with her to class if she has to. At this point, she's more or less the one raising him, and she's nine.” Kate stopped for a second to keep her voice from doing things she didn't want it to do. “She's still running after Jeanette whenever Jeanette does anything remotely out of the ordinary, of course, but that's fine since nine times out of ten she's the voice of reason. For a while she was all about soldiers and guns as well but it was obvious she was just trying to keep up with her sister. And I think this stuff is beginning to bore her. She's perfectly happy if she can sit down with a book and read about these things, and then tell everyone about what she has learned and point out all the things where we are wrong. About anything. Ever.”

Her father chucked softly. “Your brother was like that.”

“I know,” Kate lied. The truth was, she barely remembered that about him. She knew he used to love soccer, and that his favorite color was mauve, for some fucking reason, and that he once puked on her shoes when he was three.

“Lou helps out in the clinic a lot. She's good with that. I try to keep her away from the messy things, but they don't bother her.” She sighed. “A couple of years ago, when John was executing that attack on the camp in L.A. and I went with him to deal with the injured, Lou stayed behind here because the mother of her friend was very ill and she wanted to be there for Chrissy if her mom died before we were back.” Which she hadn't. Ana had wasted away for years after getting too much smoke in her lungs when their base in San Diego burned down, and there had been little Kate had been able to do for her. In the end it had killed her, but at least she had held on just until her husband had come back from his mission at John's side. If she died while he was away, she had told Kate in the last week of her life, she would have been okay with it. Her death didn't happen suddenly and they had said goodbye to each other before Hernandez had left.

Kate had imagined, often after that, herself in the same situation. Imagined she was dying and instead of staying by her side John went away to fight another battle, save another bunch of strangers, and wondered if she, in Ana's place, would have had the strength to see him off and say “It's okay.”

“Lou wants to be a teacher when she's older,” Kate told her father to take her mind off those thoughts.

“I think she'll be great,” Dad told her.

“If there's still anyone to teach.” Kate sat a little straighter, put some distance between them. “How is the situation in the north? Be honest with me.”

“You know how it is. I know you read the reports.”

“I _can_ read the reports. I rarely do. There's not enough hours in the day. If there's something going on that concerns us here, I trust someone will tell me. Besides, I mean the things not in the reports. I'm not talking about military movements here, but about the people up there. The bunkers, the scavengers in the ruins. I want to know how they are doing. They don't appear in the reports other than as statistics on the number of casualties.”

“And survivors,” General Brewster pointed out.

“It's still just numbers, Dad.”

“Well. It's pretty much the same as here, I suppose, just farther away. We do our best to have word of our victories go around, keep up everyone's hope. And things have been going fairly well in recent years. There have been more victories than losses. People are willing to risk more because they feel we might have a chance, so more are joining us. It's good.”

“It is.” It was better than Kate had expected. “But how about everyone's health? You mentioned you had seen a lot of sick people elsewhere.”

He sighed, as if he regretted that now. “Well, there's no more sunshine in Canada than there is here, Katie. There's still the lack of air, food, comfort and privacy that has been there before, no matter how well things are going on the battlefield.”

“That's actually what I wanted to know.”

“The war is long and everyone needs it to end. I haven't had much contact with anyone not in some way connected to the army in a long time, but from what I hear, things are...” He trailed off, seemed to think about what he was going to say. “I meant it when I said things are looking up and everyone has more hope now. But they are coming from a place of pretty deep hopelessness and it doesn't reach everyone. And when something happens – when we come across a settlement where everyone has starved, or we're too late or too weak to keep the machines from destroying another part of a town that had people or badly needed supplies in it, it's a hard blow, and it spreads.”

“So it's pretty much like it is here,” Kate observed. There were differences that she was aware of. Her father often operated in areas that had been less densely populated than the south-west of the Unite States where she had spend the last several years. It meant fewer places to find food and other things, fewer survivors, less help. The colder weather up there, on the other hand, didn't make much of a difference there at this point, when the entire planet had turned into a snow globe.

“It's not,” her father said gently. “I meant it when I said it's farther away. The people there feel isolated, and when something goes wrong or takes too long, they feel abandoned. You probably can't imagine how much weight John's presence carries here unless you have been to a place where he's never been. I do my best to connect to the people and to make them understand I am acting out his will, but I can't replace him. And neither can anyone else.”

Kate shuddered. Her dad made it sound like John was some kind of deity, and her father was his prophet. It wasn't a comforting thought at all. “Clearly they have never met him,” she tried to joke.

“No. That's kind of the point. Also, many feel that this, here, is where everything important is happening, and that they are kind of the forgotten stepchildren of the continent. It doesn't help that most of the really important things _do_ happen here.”

“Well, this is where Skynet has its weak spot,” Kate reminded him. “Once we can get to it, anyway.”

He nodded. “That's why I'm here.”

And that, too, probably didn't do anything to make the people in the North feel any better. Her father hadn't left them all alone; in fact, he had come with only a small portion of his army. And yet. John Connor called, and their General left them.

What John needed him for this time was not, for once, some great military operation that needed more men than where available in this part of the country. What he needed him for was, very specifically, his expertise. Because a mission was planned that would take two divisions into the heart of a former base of the US military, where one of Skynet's relay stations was located. And Robert Brewster had been stationed there once, a long, long time ago. When he had been ranked captain. When his family had lived in Los Angeles for a while and Kate had joined her classmates in laughing about John Connor, the boy with the crazy prophesies about the end of the world.

Taking this thing out would severely disturb Skynet's defense system in that area. Information would no longer be passed on immediately and any machine that discovered their activities in that sector would only be able to follow pre-programmed orders, without being able to react to changes in a situation on time. Most of the machines were old, and not very smart. A few of the newer ones were able to think for themselves within certain lines, but those were rare.

And even they would follow a certain path without Mother Skynet to tell them what else to do. Which made them predictable, if not harmless.

That was one of the very few advantages of fighting against machines. (The other one was that none of the children they send into battle actually had blood on their hands.) It didn't quite make up for the fact that they were remorseless, tireless, and unstoppable so long as they still were able to move. They didn't want anything, they didn't fear anything, and so they would never give up, and this war would only be over when they were all gone, or Skynet itself was dust.

It would take time, though. The relay station was not easily accessible, of course. They needed to sneak and fight their way through to it, and they needed to get close without Skynet figuring out that they knew it was there and were going for it. As far as she knew, the mission was estimated to take two weeks at the minimum. Two very dangerous weeks, during which she would listen in for updates every day to learn if her father had been killed yet.

At the same time, John would launch a number of attacks at other important places. As a distraction. They would go there with heavy artillery, forcing Skynet to retaliate in kind. Kate sighed. The next few weeks would be hell.

The old, mechanical alarm clock on the desk began to ring. Dad had set it when he came in so he wouldn't miss the right time to leave for a strategical meeting set for six hundred. He sighed, got up, turned it off, and went to the door. Before he stepped through it, he turned to Kate one more time. “Hardly any parent wants their children to join the military, no matter how old. That was no different before the war. I was eighteen when I left, against the wishes of my parents, and my father wouldn't talk to me until you were born.”

Kate said nothing. She hadn't known that. Her grandparents were a distant memory, as they had lived far away and rarely visited, but that memory was a fond one. She remembered, even, the last Christmas as a family when all four of them had still been alive. If there had ever been tension between her father and his, she hadn't noticed.

Her father left, and for the first time in years it occurred to her that not only she had lost her mother in the war. Sure, at this point, Grandma Helen probably would have been dead anyway, but that probably was no consolation to losing her to a nuclear explosion.

She looked at the clock, trying to make up her mind if she should just go to medical and start her shift early. But then Casey shifted in his sleep and she decided to lie down with him for an hour or so and just hold him close, making use of the time while she had it.

 

-

 

John could feel a headache forming between his temples. These meetings always did that to him. Not that they weren't important. They weren't even tedious. But there were always too many people talking at once at some point, and too many things that needed to be considered. Something always came up that he hadn't known or thought of and that needed to be included in their planing. Which was why they had these meetings in the first place.

The fact that now they had to reshape a significant part of their plan because he hadn't yet been informed about the machines' new supply route through West L.A. didn't help his mood or his headache any.

He didn't even know if he could chew someone out for not informing him about this not unimportant change, or if he had been given that information along with ten thousand other pieces of information after his last mission and had simply missed it in the overload.

By now, Bob Brewster and his men were two days out of here. They would circle the city in a distance and meet up with Perry's division halfway to their destination. John didn't know how he felt about that. Mostly, he tried not to.

The 132nd had been the obvious choice, because it was available, had two experts for explosives, and currently no new recruits who would endanger themselves or the mission with their inexperience. Even Reese had been with them for over two years. He ranked Corporal now. John had heard good things about him, those times he got the chance to hear anything, while trying not to seem particularly interested. Resourceful. Intuitive. Good thinking in battle. Always trying to improve himself.

Seemed like a sensible enough choice for sending back in time to save history.

John hadn't actually seen him again since their first chance meeting in 2020.

These changes to their plan that he now had to come up with did not affect the combined unit of Brewster' and Perry's men. They only marked an increased difficulty in the life of John and his own men, as well as those of Colonel Decker, who would team up with them for this. Their departure was planned for the twenty-second of April 2023, two days from now. John hoped this new information he had received wouldn't change their plans too much, else they would have to leave tomorrow, or they would have to tell Brewster to postpone his own mission for a few days.

Every day spend that close to the center of Los Angeles was dangerous. John would rather not do that.

The meeting ended. John stayed behind in the room with Hernandez and Elanor Decker, and together they discussed their options. They weren't many. Either deal with the machines they met where they hadn't expected any before, which would cost time and probably lives, or find away around them, which would only cost time, but a lot of it. Neither sounded particularly tempting.

Eventually Decker suggested rerouting through another part of L.A. that they had originally dismissed because there were too many machines around and they wouldn't be able to avoid fights. Now that they were considering facing some hostilities on the way anyway, they could just as well take this route. It would cut a significant amount of distance, so they'd get back the time they'd lose battling H.K.s.

If only they could get back the men that got killed for it that easily.

For an hour or so they discussed this plan like they had already decided on it. And they almost had. It looked so good. It would be the most dangerous of the options, but they were all experienced and capable fighters who should be able to deal with the machines without too much trouble.

Eventually John shook his head. “No,” he said, stopping any other talk in the room. “We're going to go around them.”

“Sir, that'll cost us days,” Decker protested.

“Days we can afford to lose. We just need to inform Brewster and Perry. They need to hang out where it's safer a few more days while we get in position. Any other option would cost lives.”

Hernandez straightened and leaned away from the table with the maps that had been the battle ground of their discussion – a sign that he accepted this without argument. Decker, on the other hand, glared at John with blazing eyes.

“You can't know that! We might just as well make it through there with no or minimal losses.”

“You can't know that,” John argued back, staying calm. “And any loss is too many if it can be avoided.”

“What about the people who will be murdered by the machines of that area in the days we delayed, then?”

“That area is largely empty. And the machines will be easy pickings once we took out that station. There's no justification risking anyone's life for something we can get for free a few days later.”

“No one going there is afraid of the machines.”

“And yet they can all die. Or lose limps. Including you.”

“I'm okay with that.” John knew she really was. She was eager to fight the machines even when she didn't have to because she hated them with a burning passion. “So are my men.”

“But I am not,” he told her, ending the discussion.

Decker had to give in, but she wasn't happy about it. John knew, however, that it wouldn't be a problem later. She would follow his orders, even if she growled about them, and she would keep to their plan once it was launched. He wouldn't have chosen her for this otherwise.

It was nearly midnight when they left the room, which meant that the daily life was going on full force. John had long since gotten used to the nocturnal cycle they had all adopted, to the point where it felt unnatural to be awake at three in the afternoon. At this time, Kate would work in her clinic if she hadn't had a day shift today and no emergencies. Right now she was probably at the south end of the bunker, checking out the state of the rooms there and trying to figure out a better way of waste disposal so far from all available exits. After that, she would eat something and then sleep until duty called her again. John would do the same, but plans had to be made and preparations revised. He probably _would_ be awake at three in the afternoon. With luck he'd catch a few hours of sleep before they left.

Near midnight, and his daughters would be in class now, if there happened to be anyone available who could give lessons. It was on-and-off teaching. In classes formed by any kid that could be made to go, their ages ranging from five to fourteen or so. By now, Jeanette was one of the oldest there, and she barely attended anymore, claiming that anything they could teach her there she had already been taught. Sadly, as far as John could tell, that was true.

There wasn't all that much to teach that mattered anymore. The people born after the war didn't care who the twenty-fifth president of the United States of America had been, or how many different nations could be found in Europe. Today's kids barely even knew that this land they lived on used to be the United States of America, or that Europe was a continent. And for their daily life and their survival in this world, knowledge like that simply didn't matter.

And Jeannie had never been particularly patient with school anyway. Lou on the other hand loved learning. She used to love school, and still liked to go to classes hoping they would yield something interesting, but most of the time they bored her now, and she did her own learning while sitting at her place, reading a book she found in the library, or studying old world maps. Sometimes she would call the teacher over to ask them questions, and if the teacher knew the answer, they would sometimes explain it to the entire class, so the arrangement worked for pretty much everyone.

A lot of the days, there were no classes at all, though. No one was only a teacher here – in fact, no one was mainly a teacher. There had been some actual teachers from before the war in this bunker, but only one of them was still alive now, and even he had other things to do most of the time. Education was a luxury these days. And John could only hope that the kids it was bestowed upon would live long enough to one day see a world where they would benefit from it.

But there were things that they _should_ teach the next generation. Things like how to cultivate land, how to breed life stock. The leftovers of civilization wouldn't last forever, and roasted rats were not a diet that could sustain them for long. There were other things, like chemistry – not for bombs but for medication. Creating energy, building and rebuilding houses –at this time there was no point thinking about that, as anything like that either demanded means they didn't have and couldn't get with the machines out there, or it would require them to be on the surface, where the machines would discover and kill them.

Right now, it was all about survival. But eventually it would be about life, and then they needed to be ready for it.

Six years to go. Year by year, the end of this war seemed a little less unreachable. And John had started to wonder what would become of his children after the return to the surface, when the world was theirs again. Lou would be sixteen then. He imagined she'd become a teacher like she wanted, but only after learning all there was to know about the things she wanted to pass on. Perhaps she would become a scientist, one of those who figured out how to make the world inhabitable again. Maybe she would find a means to travel across oceans and go visit the continents she had only read about. John knew that the Europe, Asia, Africa of the present looked pretty much like the America that surrounded them, but he liked the idea anyway.

Jeanette was a different matter. He had a hard time imagining what she would like to do after the war because right now all her intentions were focused on fighting in it. When she'd been a child, John had hoped she would grow out of this once she was older and had seen what the constant battles actually did to people, but she had never let herself be deterred. All the injuries and the trauma around her had only convinced her that she needed to go out and help in that fight, as if she alone could make a difference. There was no excuse, in her eyes, for her not doing it, as soon as possible. In a way, her single-minded focus reminded John of his mother.

He didn't tell her that. It was not in a good way. And regardless of that, the last thing she needed was a confirmation that, in whatever way, she was just like the great Sarah Connor. That would hardly slow her down.

It was bad enough that Sarah was her grandmother. Jeannie had always tried to live up to that example, and John had always been worried about that. Kate, too. They hadn't wanted their children to grow up trying to fill anyone's shoes.

There was a reason why, as much as they wanted to honor lost loved ones by naming their children after them, they had stuck to their mothers' middle names – names the origins of which no one else knew and that even Kate and John didn't immediately associate with them. Naming someone after someone else didn't make them that person, but it might people expect, however unconsciously, that they had to be. And John knew enough about the burden of growing up to fill a specific role that he didn't want to subject his own children to even a portion of that.

John had often wondered what his own childhood would have been like if his mother had not known his fate, and that of the world. Mom would have been happier, certainly. And John would have been able to play sports for fun, have friends from school that he would do normal things with, complain about the pettinesses of life, and be the person he wanted to be rather than the person he had to be. He would have been a lot more carefree, he imagined, and, of course, completely unprepared when the end came. It was his mother's relentless training that had enabled him to survive past the bombs and to this day, and while he knew that she'd done it so he could save mankind, she'd also done it to save him. He'd known that growing up, too, on some level, but it had been hard not to feel like all she cared about was his density sometimes – like all he was to her was some tool she needed to form. The worst, however, was when he had felt that all she wanted to do was model him in the image of the fucking mayfly that had been his father.

So he and Kate had been careful what names to give their kids. And they never told them to be like anyone else. What they couldn't change, though, was the fact that Jeanette, Louisa and Casey were the children of the leaders of the resistance, and other people had expectations of them that they felt they needed to meet.

At least Casey was too small to understand that yet, and if things went according to plan, he would be only nine when this was over. And after that, hopefully people would be too concerned rebuilding their society to care what some kid did with their lives.

Hernandez parted from John at the first intersection, wanting to spend some time with his daughter before coming back to help with the preparations. John sometimes wondered if Chrissy felt that pressure too, of having to fulfill certain expectations, knowing that her mother died for her. If she felt that she somehow had to make herself worth that sacrifice, that she never could be good enough. He didn't know her well enough to tell, but he knew that Hernandez worried, too. He tried to counter it by spending as much time with her as he could when he was here at the base, which wasn't a lot but still more than John could manage to spend with his own children.

He wondered if he'd get to see them before he took off. It depended on when that would be. If it was in the middle of the day, when they were asleep, or if they were busy somewhere else, he probably wouldn't, as he had no time now. Of course he could have Kate make sure they were at hand when the time came, but that could be at any time, and he didn't want to impose on their lives.

John chuckled softly and without humor as he tried to figure out when he had turned into a stranger in his own children's life. Perhaps after they lost their headquarters in 2018, when Jeanette had hated him for a few years and Lou had mostly avoided him out of solidarity. Or maybe it had always been this way, and he just hadn't been as aware.

The fact that other people didn't fare much better didn't help at all. In John's own unit, almost half the soldiers had children of varying ages, and they weren't here to see them any more often than John did. Some never saw them again at all, because they died out there, and some didn't see them again because the child had died in their absence. No one was happy. John found no comfort in that.

At least most of his men got a chance to spend a few days with their families now. John himself had seen precious little of his in the two weeks he'd been here, too busy with all sorts of things. He'd even slept in the command center most of the time. Kate had told him that her own father used to do that right after the bombings, about how lonely she had been. She'd also mentioned that she had been all alone then, while their kids had each other, friends, and sometimes their mom, so John still wasn't sure if he had been criticized there or not.

One way or another, he definitely wouldn't see them _now_. Now he had to check supplies, mark what had to be loaded onto their trucks, and use the time alone in the storage area to think more about their plan and what to do if it went catastrophically wrong. And how to prevent that. Not following the quickest route had been a big step towards the best kind of success, which was success without any casualties, but the delay brought more problems with it. Not for them, but for Brewster's team and Perry's tech-com unit. Not a big problem since they knew about the delay in advance and would be able to wait out the additional time in relatively safe distance from the target, but there was nothing like true safety out there.

If they lingered too long in one place, the machines were likely to find them. If they moved about too much, the machines were likely to find them. If they spread out to reduce the risk of detection, they would be more vulnerable in case they were detected. There was no perfect solution that John could offer.

And he wasn't going to offer anything in that regard. Perry and Bob would be in a much better position to decide what to do when, and he trusted their judgment. They didn't need him to hold their hand and tell them how to handle their jobs.

Even if Perry's job included keeping John's father from getting killed and he was kind of personally invested in that.

On the way to supplies, John stopped at communications and told the officer on duty to inform Perry and Brewster at the earliest opportunity about the change of plans. Then he made his way to the storage, down a flight of stairs and through two heavy steel doors. Two soldiers were keeping watch before the entrance, both looking bored, a dog bestowing upon John a minimum of attention as he passed.

John thought about Corporal Jameson as he passed, about the attack on the bunker five years ago, about how the presence of several terminators inside their HQ had been totally missed. People were more attentive now that they knew the danger was real, and a barking dog was taken seriously, but he still worried.

So did everyone else, and that might just save them.

There was one more person inside the storage, apparently taking stock. The room was big enough for John to still feel alone as he went to the other end and pulled out the list with all the things they would take along on their mission. It was not exactly a General's work to do this, but he liked it because it gave him an idea of their stock situation, and also because down here he hand a chance to do some thinking in peace.

They had about twenty-one explosive EMP charges here. Their tech guys were currently working on an upgraded version of this weapon, with a weaker EMP that wouldn't affect their own equipment. It also wouldn't affect the machines as much, but the stronger explosive would. For this mission communication was important, which meant the new versions would come in handy. Unfortunately, they weren't quite finished yet.

So someone would have to stay back and keep their communication devices for long distance well out of the radius of these weapons. John didn't worry about that much. They would manage with one man less. In fact, he wasn't worried all that much about the outcome of this mission. What they would do was basically what they had been doing for twenty years: find machines, destroy them, try not to get killed. It was the last part that John was most concerned with: keeping everyone alive. He didn't doubt they would achieve their objective of distracting the machines and taking the processing station they would target. He just wanted that done without losses.

Ten of the explosives got marked for his mission. The others would remain here for the use of other teams.

John turned to the heavy weapons. One grenade launcher would do. The single rocket launcher available at the moment would remain here. They would take four sniper rifles, but those were already with the corresponding snipers. In fact, most of the weapons held by the soldiers stayed with them even when they were stationed here. They would only take a few replacements, and a lot of ammo.

He moved on to the non-lethal stuff, like radios, flashlights, and blankets. Someone came in and walked over to where he was contemplating the shelves but John ignored them, hoping they had just come because they happened to have something to take from this corner of the room and would be gone in a moment. They didn't. They stopped a few meters away from him and watched what he was doing. He continued with his work, undeterred, while wondering if he should pay attention to them since they obviously wanted something from him, or just hope they would go away since it obviously wasn't important. He hadn't yet reached a decision when they said, “Dad.”

John looked up, startled. Jeanette was standing beside the shelves that divided the room, in a plain green shirt that had been worn by countless people before her, oversized pants, and combat boots. Her hair was done up in a tight ponytail that could have made her look strict and tough if she hadn't looked so insecure and young.

No, not insecure, he thought. Hesitant. Like she didn't know how to approach him.

“Hey, Honey,” he greeted her. “What brings you to my throne room?”

“I thought this was the dungeon, and they had locked you up in here. I'd come to rescue you.”

John's lips twitched into a smile. “Rescue me in half an hour. I'm not done looting the place yet.”

“Yeah, I know. If there's anything I can do to help...”

There wasn't really that much left to do, but she was offering, and John wasn't insensitive enough to decline her. She smiled when he gave her the last sheet of paper and told her to mark the objects listed there.

For a while they worked side by side in silence, and the silence was surprisingly easy. The only thing that marred it was the awareness that this was special, that it wasn't something they just did any other day. Even them being together at all was unusual, and not just because John was rarely ever here.

Four years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Who would have thought that all it took to fix things between them was for Jeannie to neglect her babysitter duties and for Kate to yell at her a lot.

“Dad,” she said now, holding the paper in her hand and apparently all done with her work. “I've been thinking.”

“That's a good start,” John replied, approvingly (and a little apprehensively). “About what?”

“I know you and Mom don't want me to be a soldier yet,” she began (and John thought that they didn't want her to be a soldier at all, but kept that to himself), “and I'm not asking to go out and battle machines out in the ruins of L.A. right now.”

“Good.”

“But I wanna do _something_ ,” she went on. “I know you all think I just wanna go and play hero, and have no idea what I'm getting into, but you're wrong. I really want to help. Everyone around me is always risking their lives to protect us and I'm sitting here being useless.”

“You're not useless, and no one thinks so,” John corrected her. Her taking care of her little brother gave Kate the peace of mind to concentrate on her work, and he knew that Jeanette had been helping with the organization of the supplies and with the cleaning of the troops' temporary quarters for years now.

“This isn't about what other people think,” Jeannie said with a scowl. “It's about what I can do. And I can do more. Just let me get basic training and then I'll help the guards outside securing the parameter of the base. There's not much going on out here so it should be pretty safe, and the real soldiers will have more time to deal with other things.”

John gave her a log look. “You have thought about this a lot, haven't you?”

Her expression turned a little defiant. “Well, I have a lot of time.”

John suppressed a sigh. He could see where she was going with this. Once she had basic training, and some experience out there, even if it was only in the relatively safe area around the base, the day would come where some division needed more manpower and she'd be ready.

But that day didn't need to come tomorrow, or even next year. And the idea wasn't a bad one. He told her as much.

“I can't make this decision now,” he finished. “But I'll talk to Tina Jackson from the training grounds once I come back from my mission.”

Jeanette hesitated only for a moment, then she nodded, and even gave him a smile. “Thank you,” she said, leaving John realize, with some astonishment, that his daughter had grown up at some point, and he, of course, hadn't noticed. He smiled back, and took a second the revel in the moment. Him. Jeanette. At peace and coming to an understanding.

He also realized that he had to keep his promise. And that he would. They had just sealed a deal, and John had let her cross a line from the other side of which he could never pull her back.

Jeannie handed him back the sheet of paper and turned to leave. Before she walked around the shelf, she stopped once more. “Say goodbye before you leave, okay?”

“I'll try,” John promised her, knowing that now, he absolutely had to.

 


	22. 2023 - 2/3

There had been a delay with the planning. Their attack of the relay station had been postponed by five days, and while that had prompted quite a lot of groaning among the soldiers of Perry's unit, it had soon turned out to be actually quite convenient. The route they had been planning to take had turned out to be impassible. A week ago, the snow had begun to melt, for the first time in years. A formerly dry riverbed had filled up with icy water running down from elevated areas, and another river nearby was no longer conveniently frozen. Now they blocked their progress, and a lot of time was spend bend over maps of the area that barely reflected the land as it was now.

They had waited at the first river until General Brewster caught up with them. Now Brewster and Perry and Jackson and some other people were brooding over their proceedings in the back of Brewster's transporter, and everyone else was making use of the enforced break to the best of their abilities. Corporal Kyle Reese, for his part, used the time standing at the edge of the river watching the water flow by. He had never seen a river before that wasn't frozen and covered in snow. He kind of wished Captain Otts were here, to ask him if he knew any poems or quotes to go with this sight, but the Captain had been hit by shrapnel in January and died of infection two weeks later.

A large shard of ice drifted past in the rapid stream and Kyle followed it with his eyes until it was swallowed by the dusk.

The ruins of a village were separated by the water. A bridge that had connected them once was destroyed, the water finding its way easily around the rubble it had left behind. While the massive stones were wet and slippery, they were stable and close enough together to allow a careful person to make it across without getting wet. In fact, Kyle could see two of the others on the other side, although the visibility was too bad to make out who it was.

Many men of their combined forces were out exploring the village, but there wasn't a lot left to explore. No building still had all walls, very few had a roof. This side of the river had not only been blasted, it had also been set on fire – scorch marks decorated what was left of houses, blackened beams were sticking out from the remains of rooftops. All these walls could offer them was some cover for their vehicles, in this area that contained nothing else.

Kyle strained his eyes to make out the ruined skyline of the city that had been the backdrop of his environment for so long without him even realizing there was more than this one out there, but darkness was falling quickly and the buildings were just shades against the horizon. Night blackened the water in front of him, leaving only a few reflections of light to dance across the surface. It looked strangely beckoning. Like a person could just walk in there and drown in it.

“Reese,” a voice called him out of his thoughts. He turned and saw Ferro walk towards him, holding her binoculars in her hand. “Look at this!”

He took the binocular and aimed them in the direction she indicated. It was too dark by now to make out much with normal means, but once he activated the night vision setting, he could see what she had wanted to bring to his attention: In the distance, far to the west, an aerial H.K. was gliding over what was left of what had once been a highway bridge across the river.

He turned a wheel at the side of the tool to mark the slowly flying machine, and numbers appeared at the edge of his vision: 1891 meters, distance growing. He set the binoculars down.

“What do we do?” Ferro asked him, and Kyle was confused for a second before he realized that he was the highest ranking officer around. Other than him, there was only Ferro here, and Richards and Smith, who, while older, had only joined them less than a years ago. Before that they had lived in the ruins, living off the things they had found in the basement of a mall not far from their hiding place, and by hunting rats in the abandoned building. Only after their supply had finally run out had they left their hideout in a town two hundred kilometers to the east and made their way through the wasteland, mostly on foot, until they found an outpost of the army and joined it.

“It's moving away from us,” Kyle told her. “If it had noticed us, it would have come here, or it would lie in wait until reinforcements arrived, so it doesn't know we're here. Keep an eye out for it and tell me if it comes back. We need to inform Perry, of course.”

“Shouldn't we attack it while it's alone?” Richards asked, having come over after he noticed something was going on.

“Or get out of here before it realizes we're here and decides to call his friends?” asked Smith, who had followed him.

Kyle shook his head. “It's too far away for a surprise attack, and any movement on our part while it's still in sight might alert it to our presence. The decision is Perry's, of course. Or General Brewster's now, I guess. But I wouldn't do anything unless we have to.”

“That doesn't sit well with me,” Smith told them. “Sir,” he added as an afterthought, because someone had chewed him out a while ago for always forgetting the chain of command and the proper form of address, especially when it came to officers who were younger than him. Kyle didn't really care about that and in fact felt a little weird being addressed such.

He could understand where the man's doubts came from. It was hard to sit still in the face of a potential threat, but he had learned that sometimes to wait and see what would happen was the only way to keep the potential threat from becoming an actual one.

“Go and inform Perry of this,” Kyle ordered him now, and that still felt weird, too: not to be at the very bottom of the chain. “I don't want to use the comm unless I have to, in case they are scanning the area.” The machines wouldn't be able in intercept their communication, but they might notice that it was happening if they were nearby. Kyle hoped no one else found something they felt like sharing with the rest of them on the radio before Perry could order them all to keep it quiet.

By sending Smith, he gave the other man a chance to voice his own opinion on this situation and how to handle it to their commander. Kyle was reasonably certain that Perry would share his view – it was, after all, a view Kyle had adopted from him – but maybe there was something Kyle hadn't considered yet, or one of their commanders decided that they were indeed better off elsewhere. So he also ordered Ferro and Richards to get their equipment together in case they needed to leave quickly.

He got his own binoculars from his back pack and scanned the environment, but found nothing. Even the H.K. from earlier had disappeared into the distance. Everything looked safe and quiet.

Through the quietness cut the voices of two women talking a few dozen meters away behind some ruins, the volume of their words indicating how safe they felt. Kyle send Richards over to them to inform them that there might be enemies around, if distant, and that they shouldn't use their comms unless absolutely necessary. He could tell that Richards had done so when the voices fell silent, too quiet now to be heard from here, even though no machine could possible be close enough to hear them even if they yelled.

“Let's go over to the trucks,” he finally said to Ferro. “The view's no worse there than it is here.” And if anything happened or was decided, no one would have to run across the grounds to get them.

  


-

  


Perry and Brewster seemed to agree with Kyle, since no action was taken in regard to the H.K.. At least no immediate action. Its presence still had an effect on the development of their plan.

The bridge it had been seen flying over was, due to the thaw, now the only way to bring a vehicle into Los Angeles from this direction, which was probably why Skynet had it under observation. It was damaged, but still passable according to those who had been in this area before, and originally, the plan had been to drive across it, even though from there it would be a while until the trucks could make it back onto the route they had planned when the river was still frozen. Now this course of action would come with a considerable risk, and a decision had to be made between accepting it and going west instead, hoping for another way across the river that might not exist for a hundred kilometers or more.

Eventually it was decided that two of their four trucks would go west with half their equipment, and the other two would take the bridge in the east, hoping to time it so that they would not be discovered. Most of the soldiers would not be on either of them but in fact walking towards the point where the east road reunited with the street they were on. Since this path was a lot shorter, the trucks taking the bridge ought not to have to wait for them for too long should they make it.

The other two trucks would go west for a night, and if they didn't find a way across the river, they would come back and try the bridge, provided the machines hadn't blown it up along with the other vehicles. Like that, the risk was spread out and chances were high that at least some of their equipment and most of the men would make it to their destination.

Since they didn't know how much time this all would cost them but knew it would be at least two days, their commanders decided to leave that very night. If there was still time left of their extra days when they were back on route, they would find a place to wait for Connor and his team inside the city. It was not without risk, but was still better than not being in position when the time came.

Each truck left with a driver and one more person to take the wheel if necessary and look out for enemies and other dangers. The ones going west left immediately, the ones that would take the bridge would wait for another hour or so, while their co-pilots walked over there on foot to check if the air was clear. Both Perry and Brewster stayed with the bulk of soldiers who would walk towards their goal, starting with crossing the river over the slippery stones that used to be a bridge.

They used lights here, trusting that they were too far from anything that could see them and not trusting their ability to cross this obstacle in the dark without falling into the water. Kyle didn't even entirely trust his ability to cross this obstacle without falling into the river _with_ lights. He didn't, in the end, but thought he would when he slipped on a stone that was mostly submerged in water and only managed to hold on at the last moment to the overhanging bit of bridge that had not yet collapsed.

Two others were not so lucky: Lieutenant Malcom, who lost his balance and fell into the water, and Corporal Mohammad, who tried to help him out and fell as well. Both managed to hold on to the rocks and drag themselves towards the other side where they were pulled out within a minute, but they were still nearly paralyzed with cold by the time supportive hands stripped them of their soaked clothes.

They were quickly packed into the dry change of clothes of someone else, but Kyle still thought for a while that they would simply freeze there and then. They kept moving on, however, with chattering teeth and cursing gravity. Wearing two pairs of thick socks to keep their feet more or less dry since they didn't have a spare change of boots.

They left the village behind and walked through what must once have been a small forest if the scorched stumps of trees in the mud where anything to go by. There wasn't much left but some logs to trip over, but Jackson, who was walking near Ferro and Sommer, was telling those two about how this area had looked before the war and Kyle listened in, trying to imagine it.

He couldn't. He had heard people talk about the trees and flowers and animals of the old times before, of the sunshine and blue skies. He had even seen pictures in faded and dirty magazines, but he still could not bring those pictures, those words to life before his eyes as they walked through the dead forest that had barely even left a corpse. That world was well and truly gone; existing not even as images conjured into the minds of those who hadn't been there to see it.

Ferro and Sommer fared no better, he could tell, and as Jackson was done talking, so, it seemed, was everyone else. For a long time they walked in silence, away from the forest and up a hill that once must have been green with grass, sprinkled with flowers, or brown and dried out by the sun in summer when it didn't rain for too long and the earth was warm underneath naked feet. _'I know nothing safe the things that the birds have lost,'_ Kyle thought, a line from one of Ott's poems.

He had found them, as promised, in the base in San Diego: a corner of the small library, filled with thin volumes of poetry, some of them half-destroyed. Some mostly illegible. And a handful of loose sheets on which Otts had written things he had committed to memory, lest they be lost forever should he die. Many of them were fragments. Many had been hard for Kyle to read, because his reading was a lot better now but handwriting often still presented a challenge.

He still hadn't read half of what was in there, because they hadn't been in the base for long at a time. The longest was two weeks in 2021, after they had returned from the ice half-starved and half frozen because they had run out of gas twenty kilometers from their destination. But a lot of those two weeks had to be spend on other things. Like learning how to be a better sniper.

Mildred Rias had turned out to be a good, patient teacher who accepted her student's limitations and tried to find ways around them. Kyle knew that he would never be a great sharpshooter who could hit a coin from three hundred meters away, but he hoped that he would be good enough.

Rias was with them now, walking near the front of their group, close to Perry. Altogether there were about fifty of them, plus the eight soldiers in the trucks. Kyle had never been out in such a big group, and he wasn't sure he liked it. The more there were of them, the easier they would be for the machines to spot.

The men and women that had come with General Brewster were all weathered soldiers, none of them under the age of twenty. They reminded Kyle of Connor's unit a little bit – only the best and most experienced soldiers made it there, and even then only if they weren't needed more urgently elsewhere. Otherwise, Perry would probably be a part of that unit as well. (Except that Kyle couldn't really imagine him constantly following someone else's orders instead of giving his own. That was probably a factor, too.)

He had never actually had anything to do with Connor's team; the only one of them he had ever met in person was Connor himself, that less-than-glorious day he had thought the General was a threat to his own baby. Perhaps it was better if they never met again. Kyle didn't really think the leader of their army would remember him, but if he did, he probably wouldn't be happy to see him. Doctor Brewster, Connor's wife, had assured him that her husband wouldn't hold that mistake against him, but Kyle couldn't imagine it would be so easily forgiven.

He wondered how that baby was doing. Casey, his mother had called him. He would be three years old now, if he was still alive. Which he probably was. Word would have gotten around if one of Connor's children had died.

If pregnancy had not been a death sentence in the camp Kyle grew up in, Laina's child would now be five years old, and Laina would still be alive.

The hill they were walking up was long, if not particularly high. When they reached the top they still had a good view over the area; or would have had, if the area hadn't been bathed in darkness. Several of the soldiers took out their binoculars, and Kyle did the same, activating night vision. They still didn't have enough night goggles for everyone to wear while walking, and the binoculars were a bad choice for that, but in this case he was more interested in the distance anyway.

The city was further away than he had thought. A wide, empty plain separated them from it. Only about ten kilometers from them the first ruins began, of one and two-floored buildings that were hard to make out before the backdrop of the higher buildings crumbling in the distance.

And between those first, flat buildings and the city lay the second river. Kyle could see it now, as a broad band of darkness running from west to east.

From here, Kyle could make out no way to get across it, but perhaps something would present itself once they got there. Movement in the sky grabbed his attention soon enough, but the H.K. cruising over the ruins was too far away as to be worth mentioning. They had known the machines would be there anyway. Kyle knew there were hundreds more that they couldn't see from here.

There was a reason why forays into L.A. were still something the army only did when they had to.

Kyle next aimed his binoculars to the east, then to the west, hoping to catch a glimpse of their trucks, but they were long since out of sight. He didn't catch sights of any burning shells, so that was good.

The bridge was still within sight, lying as still and empty as before. Kyle knew that one of the trucks had passed it without incident two hours ago, the other one had had to wait because an H.K. had been spotted before they could follow. For all he knew, they were still waiting. The air was so still and clear that he was certain they would all have heard it if the truck had been attacked just a few kilometers from where they were, even without those who kept in contact with the other teams telling them.

Due to the risk of detection, the first truck had only radioed them when it left for the bridge, and then again when it reached the other side. Th second one would keep it the same way. Kyle searched the sky in that direction and couldn't make out any dangers, but that didn't mean anything. His view from here was limited, and the others would only go when they felt safe. The bridge was long, eventually leading into another bridge that crossed the second river, with no cover in between. Once they started, they needed enough time to reach the city undetected, or they would be lost.

Unless they managed to take out the H.K. before it took out them. They did have a grenade launcher, after all...

Before he set down his viewing aid and let darkness have the world once more, he adjusted the zoom to the smallest possible setting and had a quick look at the group, now having a brief rest at the top of this hill that mostly served as a chance to get their bearings. Everyone was already getting ready to move on again, the ones with night goggles moving to the edges of the bulk to make sure no one got lost in the dark. It wasn't as pitch black as it had been on the ice that one night, but they still couldn't see much more than moving shadows.

Kyle was not surprised to see that Brewster's men all came equipped with night goggles.

During the next few hours he kept his binoculars at hand to check the horizon for enemies that may happen to come their way, but none ever did. About an hour before dawn, Brewster informed them all that the second truck had reached the city, which was rewarded with general cheer. The other two trucks, however, still hadn't found a way across the river and were struggling through difficult terrain that was forcing them further and further away from the water. If things didn't get better soon, they would have to turn around.

The group of walkers reached the first ruins at the onset of dawn. They kept walking until they came upon a collection of buildings still intact enough to offer some cover, protecting them from both detection and weather. Not that there was a lot of weather they needed to be protected from right now. They air was still, it wasn't raining or snowing, and compared to the years before it wasn't even that cold. They spread out across several buildings, none of which were intact but all of which had most of a roof, and settled down for the day.

Kyle ended up in a house that had once been fairly large, and even in ruin offered a number of rooms that had most of their walls left. He found a spot in a room in the back that was somewhat separated from the rest of the house and had probably been rather dark once. It wasn't now, because much of the back wall was missing. Kyle took off his backpack, spread out his sleeping bag, and sat on it, just enjoying not being on his feet for a moment. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall, listening to the rustle of people settling down in the other rooms. Then he opened his eyes with a start, realizing he had drifted off. For a moment panic filled him: He had missed time and in this time anything might have happened.

His panic increased when he noticed that he no longer was alone in this corner of the house. Even when he recognized Sommer, someone he had known for more than two years and knew to be friendly, it took him a moment before he got his breathing back under control.

But he kept very still during that moment. Sommer gave him a strange look from the other side of the small room but he said nothing and Kyle told himself that he hadn't noticed.

He was surrounded by people he trusted. Even falling asleep in enemy territory wasn't so bad because someone would always keep an eye out. Kyle just needed a moment to remember that.

His hand instinctively started feeling for the weapon he had placed on the floor beside him before. He found it with a feeling of both relief and horror. He should never, ever sleep with a loaded weapon in reaching distance, he knew that. Anything could have happened.

He was still holding it, his back to the large hole in the outer wall, when someone grabbed his shoulder from behind and said, “Boo!” Kyle jumped, but didn't bring up his gun, somehow managing the recognize the voice through the shock. The urge to shake off the hand, get up and either run or fight was almost overwhelming, but he kept still even when a second hand closed around his other shoulder.

“Don't do that,” he said slowly. “I could have shot you.”

“Whoops, sorry.” Wilkins didn't sound sorry at all. He squeezed Kyle's shoulders even tighter before he let it go and lifted his hands in mock surrender. “Won't do it again.”

He didn't get it. And he would do it again. And all Kyle could do what hope that he would be able to reign in his own reflexes when that happened. He'd tried talking to the older boy about it, but the freshly promoted sergeant seemed incapable of understanding the problem.

He was like this with everyone. Except Sommer, who had dislocated his arm the one time he had sneaked up on him like that, and then had punched him in the face and nearly broken his nose for good measure.

Sommer was sitting upright on his bag now, staring at Wilkins as if he wanted to do that again. Kyle send him a brief look of warning, and even that was a conscious effort because it required taking some of his attention off this guy in front of him that his instincts were still identifying as a threat even though his brain knew better.

“We're gonna have dinner,” Wilkins now told them, completely oblivious, as always, to the reaction he had caused. “If you guys want something, bring your food to the party.”

The wording only made marginal sense of Kyle, but he nodded and didn't ask. He got the important part, anyway.

Since the trucks that carried most of their supplies were elsewhere trying not to get blown up, all soldiers were carrying food for five days in their backpacks. It wasn't a lot of weight, since most of the that food was highly concentrated and dry, weighing next to nothing in it's packed form. It became edible only through application of water, and more edible if the water was hot. Somewhere someone was heating up water right now on their little portable devices, and anyone who wanted to eat was to bring one ration over to them.

There would be a queue, so Kyle wasn't in a hurry as he'd have to wait anyway and they would be here for a while. He grabbed one small pack and his bowl from his backpack and left the rest of his stuff behind, even though it was hard to do so. In the camp, what got left behind was taken by someone else at the first chance they got unless very well hidden, and in the first weeks after leaving it, Kyle had had the habit of half-burying his bags under rocks if he had to leave them for a moment. Perry had eventually told him not to do that as situations might arise in which he needed access to his stuff very quickly and so Kyle had stopped, but it went against his instincts, even now.

Sommer hesitated before following Kyle, then he picked up his backpack to take it with him. Before they left the room he turned around and dropped it back where he had set up camp. All the time they stood in line, he kept looking over his shoulder, and Kyle had a hard time both ignoring him and fighting the urge to do the same. He eventually found distraction in talking with Naya, who was waiting in front of him and told him that while he'd been out they had received word from the trucks traveling west that they had made it across the first river and were now moving on looking for a way to pass the other one. That was good news.

They had to wait for about ten minutes before it was their turn to have their meal prepared. Kyle dropped the compressed cubes into his bowl, poured some water from his bottle onto them, and handed it over to Corporal Higgins, who was manning one of the two heaters. The whole process only took a minute or so, but before Kyle's ration was ready, he was called over by Perry, who was waiting for him at the mouth of the large building they were in.

Kyle hesitated for but a second, yet leaving his food alone where anyone could take it didn't sit well with him. He still left, because he had to trust the others, including the ones Brewster brought along, or this wouldn't work. He deliberately didn't turn around after he left the cooking station, feeling like he was under observation.

Even if someone took his food – he had more. And he knew how to go hungry for a long time. Two years ago, after the ice, he had handled their brush with starvation much better than most.

Perry watched him come over, but gave no indication whether or not he had timed his call intentionally. Although Kyle had grown a lot in the past two years, the dark-skinned man still towered over him, so that he had to look up to meet his eyes.

“The river,” Perry said. “How do you propose we get over it?”

The panic made a momentary return. No one ever asked Kyle how to do things, or even how he thought about doing things. Other people, who were smarter and more experienced, made the decisions here, and he just followed them. Unless he noticed something they had missed and pointed it out to them to avoid disaster, but that didn't happen often, and no one ever cared for his opinion before he voiced it.

But if Perry asked him now, there had to be a reason. Kyle reminded himself that he couldn't break anything here – other people would come up with a plan to cross the river, regardless of what he said now. This was either a test he didn't understand, or Perry was bored and wanted to keep him from eating. He dismissed the second option and pushed aside the first one, focusing instead on the question and how to answer it.

The river was broader than the first one, but moving much lore slowly. In the distance, to the east, he could make out the bridge the trucks had taken. That one was out of the question, and not only because it was too far away and there was no point visible where they could get on it. Someone had kept an eye on the movement of the machines in that direction, and while it was irregular, they still showed up at least once in seventy minutes. Seventy minutes would not be enough time for them to reach somewhere safe.

In the other direction, Kyle couldn't make out any bridge at all, just a crumbled structure by the side of the river that may once have held one. If it had, there was nothing left now. No heavy stones had fallen into the water. Perhaps it had been wood and everything had burned.

If he had to look for a way across, he would go west, where there was no machine activity they knew about. There wasn't much in that direction, and the trucks going that way had reported no sightings. It might be a long track however, with no guaranteed reward, and Kyle would rather not make it if it could be avoided.

He stepped closer to the water's edge. The water was clear and in the gray daylight he could see the bottom. It wasn't very deep. By the look of it and judging from a few rocks that pocked through the surface near the center, it didn't get much deeper than that all the way to the other side.

Being not rapid, Kyle supposed they could walk through it. But he thought about Malcom and Mohammad, whose teeth he had heard chattering all through the night even though the temperature was well above freezing. The river was wide, reaching the other side would take two, three minutes at least. Maybe more, if the ground was more difficult towards the center than it looked from here.

Walking through it would still be preferable to the risk of making a long detour and still having to walk through it in the end due to not finding any kind of bridge. And there was no telling how the river looked further west. It might be even wider, or deeper. This was a good spot. It was just very cold.

He wouldn't have everyone cross at once, anyway. One would go first, seeing if it was really passable, how deep it got. They would be ale to keep mostly dry, keeping their backpacks easily above the water, and they should take off their boots so they didn't get wet.

Or perhaps....

“If we got to lift up those rocks over there,” he pointed at the rubble that must once have been the pillar of a bridge, “and place them in the river one after the other, we might be able to create a way to reach those stones in the center, and from there the other side without everyone having to wade through the water.” With luck, they might even be able to place them so that no one had to enter the water by balancing on those already placed, but Kyle knew that was highly unlikely and trying might be dangerous.

Perry nodded. “Not a bad idea. Those stones are too heavy for less than two of the stronger ones to lift together, though. Still, worth a thought. Tell me about your line of thought that got you there.”

Kyle did, concluding with, “Once you notice the water is shallow, it seems kind of obvious. If the trucks were here, they could probably ride through this wa-” He stopped short when another thought came to him.

Perry smiled. “I had the same thought. The trucks could carry us over there without anyone having to get wet. And the two trucks in the west are still looking for a way across. Someone will have to walk over there and back, test the ground. If it's stable and not too deep, I will radio them to come back here if they can, once it's dark. We'd lose half a night waiting for them, but it's the best solution for two problems.”

“I volunteer,” Kyle said immediately. “For crossing the river.”

His commander laughed. “Commendable. But you can't swim. If it should turn out to be deeper than it looks or the current to be stronger than it seems, that would be inconvenient.”

Kyle didn't think it made that much difference, since the water was so cold even someone who _could_ swim wouldn't make it for very long before the icy water paralyzed them. Before he could point that out, though, Perry informed him that he was on watch duty until noon, and Kyle went to get his binoculars from his bag, not entirely sure what this whole encounter had been about.

Sommer waited for him at the entrance to the building. He had an empty bowl sitting beside him, and was guarding another one that he handed to Kyle as he came closer.

“Thank you,” Kyle said, surprised. He had almost forgotten about his meal. Eating it would only take a minute, and someone else was already watching the environment. He had a chance to eat it and he did, standing there with his semi-automatic dangling off his shoulder; the only piece of equipment he always took with him.

“What was that about?” Sommer wanted to know. Kyle shrugged.

“Beats me.”

Perry was in a discussion with Naya and a man called Bjorn from Brewster's team about something when Kyle left to pick up his equipment and seek out a good place to watch the area from at the east side of the ruins. When he came near the river again, Perry was knee-deep in the water, his pants rolled up to his tights, yelling to Naya about how fucking cold it was. They were laughing at him. Kyle watched for a moment, then remembered that he had different things to watch and walked around a corner with a sense of regret.

Exhaustion suddenly sat deep in his bones as he stalked through the remains of the homes of people long gone, but he pushed it away and out of his mind. He could go on until noon. It wasn't even that far away.

Finally he settled onto a low wall just outside the last building. He scanned the horizon once with his binoculars, then had a look at the closer environment when it yielded nothing. From a distance, he could hear Perry's voice. “I think I'll stay on this side until the truck comes,” the commander called, which probably meant he had made it and his plan would work.

For a while Kyle's attention was caught by the sky. There was nothing of interest there, just clouds, in different shades of gray. Shifting. Moving. The lower layer sometimes tearing open only to reveal the higher clouds above.

It was a bright day, as bright as they ever got. Kyle had heard people say, a few times now, that they thought the clouds would finally break open soon, to reveal the sun. Kyle wondered what that would be like. He wondered, because he had heard talk about it, whether the sunlight would bring back life to the planet, whether any plants or insects had survived underneath the surface just waiting to wake up, or if the long dark cold had killed everything and those still alive were doomed to eventually starve to death on a world that had nothing left to give.

The thought filled him with more fear than the machines ever could – not the sudden, violent fear of gunfire and explosions, not even the constant fear of punishment from the camp, but a lingering, low-grade dread that festered and grew. It also filled him with infinite sadness. So he tried not to think about it. He also tried not to hope for the sun because he knew very well that he might never see it, but he wanted it so badly.

A movement out of the corner of his eye tore him out of his thoughts. Kyle jumped, suddenly wide awake, but there was nothing there. His weapon ready, he took a few steps, looking down to where he thought he had seen something small and gray against the brown stone of the ruins. He knew there were machines that small for maintenance, but why would they be here? A rat, perhaps? Or his imagination?

Stepping all the way to the place where he'd see it revealed nothing, so he was almost convinced it was the last option. Just to make sure he walked around a half-collapsed wall to check the other side.

He stopped short. There was something there, and it was small and gray, but it wasn't a machine. It also wasn't a rat. It was... Kyle didn't actually know what it was.

It was not a dog. Kyle had seen some of them in San Diego, watching the entrances, and while he had never had the chance to inspect them up close, he had a pretty good idea what a dog looked like: big, brown-and-black, with a long snout and long pointed ears. This thing was much smaller, with dirty gray fur and a little face that was mostly big yellow eyes with slit pupils. Kyle was sure it was some kind of animal, but he didn't know what. Maybe one of the others would know.

It didn't look dangerous, in any case. It looked scared. But when Kyle slowly came closer, it didn't run but stayed where it was, looking at him, letting out a thin, high-pitched sound.

It was by this sound that Kyle recognized it, or thought he did. He'd heard someone imitate the sounds of various animals once, during a long truck ride, out of boredom. What was it again? A cat? People had talked about cats every now and then, the older ones. Used to keep them as pets, or to catch mice. Kyle had even seen a picture once, but it was hard to reconcile that proud, striding thing with the orange fur with this bony, frightened creature before him.

The ears of the animal were laid flat against its body and he noticed that one was half missing. From the fact that it was obviously scared but not running, Kyle deducted that it was probably injured. Injured and hungry and scared. And alone. He crouched down – slowly, so as not to scare it more – and carefully ran his hand over the dirty fur. He could feel it tremble, but still it made no motion to get away. When, after a minute, he held his hand in front of its face for inspection, it sniffed it and then softly bumped its head against his fingers. So he petted it more, wondering if he should call this in.

But what for? This animal was not a danger, and probably not of interest to anyone but him. Also, more people would probably frighten it more. It seemed that it had just started to relax a little bit, the ears no longer as flat. And when Kyle slowly stood to look over the wall and check on the horizon again, it made that sound again and stood on thin, long legs that didn't seem quite willing to carry its weight as it took a few steps towards him and rubbed against his legs.

So Kyle bend down and lifted the animal into his arms. It weighed next to nothing, and the long, narrow body was incredibly thin. Cradling it carefully in his arms, he walked back to the stones he had sat on before and resumed his watch with the little thing in his arms, occasionally taking his eyes off the sky to scratch it between the ears. It curled up on his lap and resumed that rumbling sound. Kyle didn't know what that mean. Maybe there was something wrong with it. Or it was angry. It didn't seem angry, though. He didn't hold it tight, just so it wouldn't slide off his lap, yet it never tried to leave.

The day got even brighter as another hour passed. As if the sun wanted to break through the clouds at any moment, but it never did. A flying machine appeared on the horizon, so far away even the binolulars barely caught it, but never came any closer. The little body in Kyle's lap was surprisingly warm; he could feel it even through the thick fabric of his pants. He could feel its bones poking out, too, and regretted that he didn't have anything edible to give to it.

What did these animals even eat?

Meat, probably. There had to be insects somewhere. If this really was a cat it might have hunted rats, although it didn't look strong enough for that right now. Even though he could see no blood, Kyle was sure that it was injured in some way.

He wondered if there were other cats around. He hadn't seen anything since they got here, not even a shadow.

Now he did see something. Someone was coming towards him from the direction of the houses they were all occupying for now, and when Kyle turned he saw that it was Wilkins. Fortunately, the man had not tried to sneak closer this time, probably because Kyle had a loaded weapon in his hand and was somewhat tense from keeping watch. Kyle was grateful for that, because Wilkins trying to startle him would have scared the little animal he was holding.

As Wilkins came closer, Kyle automatically leaned over the animal – not to hide it but to keep it from being freaked out by the new arrival. Wilkins noticed, of course. He looked curious.

“Came to relieve you of watch duty,” he explained. “What do you have there?”

Kyle leaned back a bit. The animal looked at the other soldier, its ears once again flat against its body and its fur standing on edge. It seemed to burrow even deeper into the folds of Kyle's coat. “I found it in the ruins.”

Wilkins' face lit up in an expression of pleasant surprise. “Look at that! I haven't seen a cat in years!”

He reached out to pet the cat, surprisingly gently for someone whose favorite past time it was to hang off other people. The cat relaxed a little under the chin tickles but remained somewhat wary.

“What does it eat?” Kyle asked.

“Anything it can get that is smaller than it and alive. Like, bugs and spiders, and rats.” Wilkins stood from his crouched position and looked over the ruins. “You know, I was born not far from here, but my family left the area when I was about five because the machines kept coming closer and closer in their searches. I think we might have passed through this village on the way out. Anyway, we used to have a few cats in the community we ended up in, over in Bakersfield. They weren't really pets, just something to keep the vermin out, and I think we might have eaten one or two of them. But there was one I was really fond of as a kid. I named him Benz, after the car my dad used to talk about...” He trailed off.

“Why does it rumple so? It doesn't seem aggressive at all.”

“That's called purring, and cats do it when they feel good, so it must like it there. But they also do it when they are in pain, to comfort themselves, my aunt once told me. She used to have a lot of cats before the war.”

Kyle looked at the cat again. “I think it's hurt.”

“Well, it doesn't look very good, does it?” Wilkins threw a long, silent look at the cat, then he looked up at the sky. “And it looks like it might rain later. You best take it with you inside if you don't want it to be miserable _and_ wet.”

That sounded like a good idea. “There's a hunter killer in the east, but it hasn't come any closer than the ruin on the hill. I haven't seen any others so far.”

“I'll keep an eye out,” Wilkins promised, and Kyle walked off, the cat held securely in his arms.

He stopped by Captain Rias to make his report before he went back to where he left his things. The woman asked him where he had found the cat and briefly scratched its ears, but other than that didn't comment on it, so Kyle didn't think there was any problem with him taking it inside.

Sommer was asleep inside his sleeping bag, or at least Kyle thought he was. It was never easy to tell with him, as he tended to fake it when he didn't feel comfortable with something. Kyle did that, too, when he felt sleep was expected of him and he didn't want to admit to not feeling like he was safe enough for it, or that the others weren't safe enough. Today it wouldn't be a problem. He felt safe enough, even with the strangers around. He knew and trusted his comrades, and no matter what Wilkins said, it didn't even look like the weather would turn against them. And he was tired.

But he also had a little friend to look out for.

The cat made that sound again, and then again, as if to protest when Kyle set it down. It stood on its weak legs and took some unsteady steps towards him, getting in his way as he settled down and pulled the sleeping bag over his legs. Finally, it tried to climb onto him, and Kyle picked it back up to let it rest on his stomach. He didn't think he would sleep today, for fear of the cat getting hurt or scared by any nightmares he might have, but he still made sure that his weapons were all out of reach and the safety on.

Kyle didn't try to sleep, and in fact tried not to sleep, but it was nice to be off his feet, to lie down, and even though it wasn't cold by the standards he was used to, it was nice to be inside the isolated sleeping bag. The warm weight of the cat was also nice. Kyle wasn't stupid enough to think that he could just keep the animal with him. It would get in the way, or would get killed. But it was nice, anyway, this company of something that didn't expect anything from him but to exist.

If he could find something to eat for it, maybe it would have a chance to survive here and get its strength back. Already he felt sadness and guilt at the thought of leaving it behind. With the way it stuck to him, clearly it was scared here, all alone...

The cat was purring. Kyle didn't know if it was happy or unhappy or both. It appeared to be mostly asleep, though. On the other side of the room, Sommer probably wasn't. He was never that still when he was asleep. Kyle lay on his back and watched the clouds drift by outside. They moved quickly, as if in a great storm, but down here there was hardly any wind at al. From the other side of the open, broken door he heard the voice of his commander talking to someone. So Perry had decided not to wait on the other side of the river until the trucks could pick him up...

For the second time that day, Kyle opened his eyes with a start. He hadn't drifted off this time, but it had been close. With a sigh, he sat upright, accepting that lying down, even though it would be his last chance for a while, was too much of a risk. His movement disturbed the cat, and it turned around until it sat on his stomach and looked into his face with an expression he could only interpret as accusing.

“What's that?” Sommer asked. He was sitting up, too, rubbing his eyes. Perhaps he had fallen into real sleep in the end.

“It's a cat,” Kyle explained. “I found it in the ruins.”

“A cat?” Sommer came over, to have a closer look. “Can you eat it?”

“No. It's too skinny. And probably sick.”

“Ergh.” Sommer watched the cat curiously, but didn't try to touch it. Kyle kept petting it and after a while it settled down once more. It was purring again, but he thought that it was also trembling. Was it cold? In pain? He was sorry that he couldn't help it.

Outside, the light was slowly fading. Naya showed up when it was nearly gone, to check out the cat Rias had told her about. They wouldn't leave here for another four hours, she informed them. The trucks were on their way, and it looked like the path was clear for them, but they would need some time to arrive.

So Kyle and the cat waited until it was dark, and then some. Others came and went, to check out the little ball of fur, and many of the younger ones like Kyle had never seen a cat before. By the time General Brewster came in, it was sleeping in the crook of Kyle's arm – or pretending to be asleep, at least. It opened one eye to look at the general as he approached and then stopped in front of them, looking down.

Kyle knew he was expected to get up now, but when he made to move, Brewster gestured for him to remain seated.

“We used to have a lot of cats where I grew up,” he mused. “I loved playing with them as a child. But when I had children myself, my wife and I decided against letting the kids have a dog or a cat because we moved so much and thought the animals wouldn't take that very well.”

Kyle looked up at the man before him and remembered that he was the father of Kate, the friendly woman who had dressed his wounds after the camp he had grown up in went up in flames, and didn't hold it against him that he tried to run off with her baby. He'd never seen her again after that, but remembered her kindness in a way that had helped him deal with his new and intimidating environment during his training and the first weeks with Perry's division.

Now he was looking for signs of the daughter in the father's face, and couldn't find any. What he remembered best about Kate was her striking red hair, and the General most certainly didn't have that. He had very short white hair, and lines of age and weariness running through his face, and his eyes were more gray than blue. But despite his tall, imposing frame and the hard lines around his mouth there was a certain gentleness about him that did remind Kyle of his daughter as he crouched down and ran a large hand softly over the cat's back, barely touching it.

“You know you can't take it with you,” he said.

“Yes, Sir.”

“It looks weak. Is it injured?”

“I think so, Sir. It can't walk well.”

Brewster nodded thoughtfully. “It can't hunt anymore, then. It's obviously starving, and if it stays here it will starve to death.” He sighed, and Kyle looked at the cat, not at his face, knowing what he would say next. “The only thing we can do for it is put it out of its misery.” He wrapped his hands around the thin, furry body and made to lift it out of Kyle's arms. “I'll take care of it. Don't worry, it won't even know what's happening.”

But as he tried to lift it, the cat dug its claws into Kyle's coat and let out a yowl so miserable he tightened his grip around it. “No,” he said, emphatically. “No, Sir,” he corrected himself. “I'll do it myself.”

When he looked up again, briefly, Brewster had a look of doubt on his face. “Are you sure, Corporal?”

“Yes, Sir.” The cat tried to dig its head into the crook of Kyle's arm. It was still making sounds of distress. Clearly, it didn't want to be parted from him. And if it had to be killed, at least it shouldn't have to be terrified in the arms of a stranger in its last moments. What did it matter that it wouldn't see it coming if it was afraid anyway? “I've done it before.”

“With an animal?”

Kyle bit his lips as images of a pale and bloody face flashed before his eyes. Looking at him. Looking at the stone. “No, Sir.”

After a moment of silence, Brewster got back to his feet, clapping Kyle's shoulder as he did so. “Alright,” he said. “The truck will arrive in thirty minutes. I suggest you do it soon.”

Kyle nodded wordlessly and waited for the General to leave before he got up and walked out through the hole in the wall with the cat in his arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The line Kyle is thinking of is from a translation of the poem _There's No Forgetting_ by Pablo Nuerda.


	23. 2023 - 3/3

The trucks had no problem at all crossing the river, and they kept going until the end of the night. The route took them well into territory fully controlled by the machines, so they had to slow down and move carefully not long after they left the river behind. It would be another day before the two other trucks would meet them, but according to the communication they had received from them, the others would be at the meeting place hours before them, given they did not run into trouble. The streets they moved on were more frequented by the machines, but both trucks traveled independent of one another and without a back full of people, so they were somewhat freer in their movement and could evade trouble more easily.

At several points, the men and women on the trucks had to get off and spread out, walk through a particular area all by themselves, and then get back on board when the difficult stretch was behind them. It was tedious and slow, but if any of them were spotted, or the trucks destroyed, at least not everyone would be lost at the same time.

Still, it could have been worse. They were nearing their destination from a side of the city that contained next to nothing and didn't have a lot of machines patrolling. Obviously Skynet didn't know they were coming, else it would have thrown more defenses at them.

Unless it was a trap. That had happened before. And they couldn't do anything about that possibility but hope that it wasn't.

Their progress was slow and they lost a lot of time, but not nearly as much as the delay on Connor's side had brought them. In a way, Connor had the more dangerous part of the mission. It were Perry and Brewster who had to attack and blow up the relay station, but Connor and Decker had to be the ones who got noticed by the machines.

Not that this troop would get away without fighting. There was a reason why they were coming with four trucks and almost fifty people. But if things went well, they would only have to deal with the machines not yet engaged in fighting the army at the other end of the city.

Once they had started here, however, they only had a very short time to finish before the machines gave their attack the higher priority and came over in bulk.

It was not the first time the army used this tactic. Everyone worried that this time Skynet would not fall for it and wait from them with an arsenal aimed at their asses.

Robert Brewster called up a mental map of the facilities into his memories, trying to figure out how to get where the fastest and what areas to avoid. He sighed. It seemed to him that John put a little too much faith in the fact that he had been stationed there once. Yes, he knew the complex, but that had been thirty years ago. Even if his memory didn't fail him, there had been changes, the most relevant of them the nuclear war that drastically changed the landscape. When the machines took over the place, they certainly modified it to suit their needs. Brewster's presence gave the team a little bit of an advantage, but not nearly as much as John seemed to think.

It was still far away. They had to cross the center of L.A. before they got there, and that would be the most dangerous part. For that, they would leave the trucks behind, split into groups. They had calculated about a day from that point until they reached their destination. From now they still had four days to even get to that point. They could take their time, play it as safe as possible.

This night, they barely made it into the city. As soon as the sky started to brighten with the oncoming day, they stopped, hid the trucks, and spread out over the ruins of an abandoned apartment building to lay low for the daylight hours. They hadn't made a good distance today, but under these circumstances that didn't matter. In fact, the more time they spend out here the less they would have to spend further in, so their slow pace worked to their advantage.

Brewster was sure he had been in this area before, a long time ago, but it had been destroyed to the point where it wasn't recognizable anymore. A few buildings were still standing, like the U-shaped apartment complex they were in, but none of them were particularly recognizable,

A few hundred meters from them a skyscraper was leaning precariously to the side, waiting for the last push to topple it over. When it did, it would block their road, make it hard, if not impossible to go past this point with a motorized vehicle that had more than two wheels. Brewster looked at it and decided to leave one of the trucks behind right here, just in case. If the machines were smart, and they didn't manage to take them all out in time, they might fire a rocket into that tower to block their retreat route, and even if they got out alive, they'd all be facing a very long walk home.

Well. At least until John send someone to pick them up, anyway. Still, the faster they got out of here, the better.

Right now they weren't going anywhere. The sun had only risen an hour or two ago, and most of the soldiers hadn't even settled down to rest yet. The days were long this time of year, even if the sun couldn't be bothered to bless them with any actual light, which meant the time they got to rest was actually longer than the time they had to move on. Even though the trek was exhausting, everyone still had energy to spare.

Well, almost everyone. Brewster looked out from the doorway of the building into the square place surrounded by it where they had parked their trucks. People were swarming around them, although most had taken to the building. Among those still outside was the young corporal who had found the unlucky cat the day before, now wandering between the crumbling structures in the light of the morning, looking lost. Whenever Brewster caught a glimpse of his face, though, it showed him nothing.

His thoughts turned dark, as they often did when he saw their soldiers like this. His own team consisted of older, high ranking mean and women, without exception, and that made sense because they often went on missions that needed experience and foresight, but he would be lying to himself if he denied how nice it was not having to see all the time that their war was being fought by goddamn children.

“Don't you ever look at them and just feel like wrapping them in blankets and feeding them cheeseburgers?” Perry asked beside him, as if he'd been reading his thoughts.

“They don't know what cheeseburgers are.”

“Doesn't make it any better.”

“It wasn't meant to.” Brewster shook his head. “It doesn't matter what we want. We can't change the way things are.”

“Doesn't mean we have to like it.”

“And we don't.” The general turned his attention to the window at the corner of the highest floor of the building. Outlooks were posted at all corners, watching in all directions. H.K.s were all around them, but so far none had come close enough to be a danger. “But it'll be over someday. And hopefully they'll get to see it.”

“Hard to believe sometimes, that this war ever started, never mind that it may have an end,” Perry remarked. “Other times I can't believe it's been so long since I last saw the sun, or heard a bird sing, or went out with my buddies for some drinks we were too young for.” He pointed south, towards the road they had been driving on. “I've only been here two or three times to visit my granny when I was a kid, but my parents both grew up in Los Angeles. They met in a night club on Pico Boulevard, maybe five miles from here.”

Brewster had to smile against his will. Sometimes it was nice to hear someone talk in miles and yards, the measurements of his youth. “They take you there?”

“Hell no. And it was closed by the time I was old enough to go. There was a shooting in there, some dude with an automatic just mowed down all the dancers for no goddamn reason. That's how I remember. It was all over the news when I was six or so. My mom was very upset. A few hours later the same guy took out an entire police station. Pretty big news.”

Brewster remembered it now. It _had_ been all over the news, and as far as he knew they had never found the guy who did it. Or the guys. Witnesses had talked about one single assailant, others had mentioned another man armed with a shotgun at the night club, but even two would have had a hard time murdering their way through an entire station full of armed police. Brewster had always thought there must have been more people involved, and experts on the TV had even talked about the attacker having inside help, about officers shooting down their fellow officers for some reason, but nothing had ever been proven.

It had been terrible at the time, and Brewster devoted a moment to being amazed how tragedy like that paled in comparison to the entire world dying.

He said as much. Perry snorted softly. “Hard to believe that all this should be over some day.”

“Not some day,” Brewster corrected him. “According to Connor, it'll be over in less than ten years.”

Perry looked thoughtful. “Well, given the progress we have made in the last few years, that doesn't seem impossible anymore. We just need to fight a steady way into the heart of L.A. and find a way to flatten their defense grid. Nothing easier than that.”

“Is that sarcasm I detect there?”

“Is it? I think at some point in the past twenty years that tone has become by standard when talking about our prospects, so I can't tell.” Perry shook his head, looking out into the square, where the last soldiers were now retreating into the building. It looked like rain. “Still, Connor's predictions are usually pretty accurate when it comes to the developments of the war.”

“You're right. I have been wondering about that, actually.”

Now Perry snorted loudly. “Don't tell me you have joined the legions of those who think our esteemed leader can see the future.”

Brewster rolled his eyes. “Don't be silly. John Connor is many things, but he is not a superhero with psychic powers, no matter how badly some of the men want to see him that way. But he _has_ been ridiculously accurate with his predictions so far. When I first met him – no, _before_ I first met him, even, he was running around, warning people everywhere about the killer bots that would come to wipe out what was left of mankind. That was right after the war.”

Perry nodded. “Yeah, I've heard those stories. About how John Connor started fighting the machines before anyone had ever even seen one.” He stopped. “Hold on. You've known him so _that_ long?”

“Yeah.” Brewster smirked. “He was barely thirteen when I first met him. Told everyone he was fifteen so they would take him at least a little seriously.”

A brief grin flashed over Perry's face. “Ah. So that explains it.”

“Explain what?”

“Ah, never mind. So what's your theory on it, if we're ruling out superpowers?”

“I can only work with what he told me. Back in the day, he came to us with this story about how his mother knew CyberDyne was up to something and tried to destroy it, but no one listened to her.”

“Yes, I know _that_ story. I mean, who doesn't? How Sarah Connor tried to save the world before the world even knew it was in danger. Good ground to build a legend on.”

“Indeed. Except I got the impression it's actually true. I have heard the original version, before countless retelling added to it, and it seemed genuine enough.” Brewster frowned, watching the sky. If it rained through the night, the next part of their trip would be very uncomfortable. “I've just been wondering, because the way Sarah Connor trained her son for exactly what happened and what he had to do was was oddly specific, don't you think?”

Perry seemed to think about it. Finally he shrugged. “You're right. But once you have settled on 'Killerbots are going to enslave mankind', there's really only one way the story can go, is there?”

Brewster chuckled. One of Perry's men who happened to walk past them gave him a weird look. “I guess you're right. Let's just agree that the late Mrs. Conner was quite impressive and well prepared.”

“No argument from me. I'd toast to it, but we're fresh out of booze.”

That was another of the many, many downsides of the apocalypse: The regrettable dryness of it. Not that Brewster had ever been much for heavy drinking, but there had been a few occasions that would have called for the symbolic drink. It wasn't even that all the alcoholic beverages of the world had somehow evaporated with the blasts of the bombs. In fact, in the early days, they had come across more than one person who had found their way into an undestroyed bar or liquor store and subsequently drank themselves to death. And some of the communities of scavengers basically hoarded the stuff. But the army was pretty strict about alcohol. Those who went out for supplies barely ever brought any since other things had a higher priority, and what they had was locked away and rarely given out. No team going out carried booze, and in the bunkers no one was allowed to get drunk, not even if they wanted to. It had something to do with avoiding inebriated people with firearms in a tight environment crammed with people and explosives.

And also with the fact that people who had to sit on top of each other in tight spaces without privacy or sun day in and day out tended to get aggressive, so the last thing they needed was something that lowered their inhibitions.

That was the argument, anyway. Brewster had secretly thought that a stiff drink could have ended one or two arguments he had witnessed before they got out of hand. (He knew better than to say that aloud, though.)

“Well.” Perry clapped his old friend on the shoulder and made for the square. “I've got some people to check up on before I take care of the supplies. See you later, Sir.”

Brewster watched him cross the place to the other wing of the building. His thoughts wandered once again to to the kid who had to kill the cat just a few hours ago and was now wandering around trying to look very hard like nothing was wrong. Perry had told him the boy had grown up in one of the machines' camps, so that cat had probably the first animal he had ever seen that wasn't a guard dog, a rat, or a cockroach. Brewster wished he could have taken the mercy kill from him. Not that he was all that keen on killing a scared, helpless animal, but that was one little thing that he would have liked to spare that boy.

Unfortunately, the young soldiers especially tended to take it the wrong way if the older ones tried to protect them, so he'd backed off without a fight.

Now he wondered if he should have insisted. Pulled rank, or something. The rank system of their army didn't quite work the same way he knew it from the U.S. Army and left a lot of room for improvisation and interpretation, but General still offered a lot of rank to pull. It should have given him enough power to protect one of their soldiers from yet another painful memory.

Brewster looked out over the decaying building, the few soldiers still out, throwing wary looks at the horizon. He imagined Jeanette among them and it made everything even worse. She was about fourteen now, well old enough to be one of those soldiers out there by the truck. But she wasn't, and for that he would be eternally grateful.

He knew some people were talking; about how none of Connor's children were being used as canon fodder in this war when usually they took anyone old enough to handle a gun. That young corporal with the cat wasn't much older than his granddaughter. And that Jeanette _wanted_ to be a soldier was no secret either, so everyone knew it was her parents' will that kept her off the battlefields. One day that might cause trouble, but Brewster was still glad Kate's oldest was as safe as she could possibly be. At fourteen she shouldn't worry about fighting machines to the death, nor should joining an army be an option.

He had met both Jeanette and Louisa briefly before leaving for this mission. They had barely known who he was, and mostly he had gotten the impression that they, more than anything else, were taken by the fact that they even _had_ a grandfather, which probably was a rarity to them. He had not been able, even though he had spend the last twenty-six years fighting, to give them a word to be children in. At fourteen, even their mother had lost that world and that childhood.

He remembered Kate now, the way she had been when she was fourteen, still reeling from the shock and the loss, so hurt and angry, and trying so hard to be brave.

And whenever he had wondered if they wouldn't have been better off if they'd gone with Lily and Charlie to a violent but instant death, she had reminded him that there was still fight in them, and it would not die.

He had wanted something better for her. For her and her children. And now he thought, he hoped, that before her kids were all grown up, they would get to live in a world without machines. That they would live to see a world that had a chance to heal – even as he was beginning to accept the idea that he would not.

The last two people were taking their stuff from the trucks and left for the inside. Brewster looked at the vehicles. If they really were to leave one behind here, he would have to take stock and decide what to leave behind with, for the way back – in case this would indeed be the one truck they'd have left.

Then his eyes fell on the skyscraper again, its silhouette a stark dark think against the horizon. Maybe he had been wrong about it, he thought. Maybe it wouldn't fall, no matter how much it looked like it had to. It had stood here, like this, for decades. Earthquakes had not brought it down. Maybe the machines wouldn't, either.

  


-

  


The center of L.A. had been one of the places first occupied by the machines. Anyone who had survived Judgment Day in this area had been taken out by them pretty quickly, and so no one had ever had a chance to loot all the stores and bars and apartments that lined the streets.

The war hadn't left much to loot, admittedly. Most buildings were collapsed, those that were still standing were burned out. And yet every now and then, they came across a storefront with readable signs, or a flat building that still had all of its windows and doors intact.

So at one point they spotted a convenience store. Janine knew what a convenience store was because the place where she had spend the first seven years of her life had had one: a place where they could trade useful things for other useful things they needed more badly. It had had a lot of stuff, some of which she hadn't even understood, and her mom had never explained them to her. When they ran out of stuff to trade, Mom would go into the ruins to bring more, and Janine had always feared she wouldn't come back, but she always had. Her uncle hadn't come back, though, and neither had her granny, and when Granny was gone, Mom had taken her and left that place to find that army everyone was always talking about.

This area here reminded her of the ruins of her childhood, except it was much easier to find stuff in this place. It was basically just lying around, waiting to be picked up. If her mom had found this while they were still with the scavengers, she could have traded them everything they wanted, forever.

Of course, her mom wasn't around anymore. She had enlisted when Janine was eight, and hadn't been around much at all after that. She'd still made sure to see her daughter, when she could, but after that point, Janine was mostly raised by whoever happened to be there at the moment. Her favorite had been Peter, who had gone half-blind in an explosion so he couldn't fight anymore, and whom she sometimes thought of as her dad. He'd even become her mom's lover for a while. They had ended up in the main bunker in San Diego just before the Terminators attacked it and Peter had died in the fires. Mom had left her division for a few weeks to take care of Janine, but eventually she had started going on missions again until finally she had left for a trip she did not return from after all.

Janine had made it mostly on her own before – she managed all on her own after. As soon as she got the chance she enlisted, trained, and finally ended up with Perry's division, and if anyone were to ask her, that was all she'd ever need in her life.

They had left the truck two blocks down the road because this one was impassible for it. Perry had send them here anyway, knowing that intact shops had to be somewhere around this way and they needed some supplies for the way back. Janine's group consisted of five people, other teams of five or six had been send in the other direction. They had an hour before they had to get back. Plenty of time. They had plenty of time.

She felt herself grinning. The sky above them was clear of anything dangerous, and even though she kept looking up, it was in amazement rather than worry. The clouds up there were slowly changing colors from dark gray to grayish-blue as the daylight crept up on them. It was dawn and they had yet an hour to roam around because no one was worried about being seen and attacked by the enemy.

The attack on the relay station had worked almost perfectly. They had destroyed it, they had even been able to harvest some data from it before they did so. About a dozen soldiers had been injured in the attack, but only three had been killed. Okay, four – there was this woman from the General's team who wouldn't make it long enough to get back to San Diego. Janine's hands balled into fists as she thought about Ennio, who had been a friend since she had come here.

At least now she knew that the sight of torn apart bodies didn't faze her as much anymore. Mostly, it made her angry, especially if that body belonged to someone she cared about.

Anger and sadness. It was a bad mix, something that led to bad decisions. Fortunately, it hadn't lasted long, and in the time it had, her comrades had prevented her from doing anything stupid that would get her killed. That was why she didn't want to be anywhere else than here, with these people. They looked out for each other.

And yet, many were dead. That was the fault of the machines, though, not of anyone here, and Janine tried not to dwell on it. _“Remember the good things,”_ her mother had used to say. _“One day we're all gonna be dead, anyway.”_

(If that had been supposed to be comforting, Janine wasn't quite sure it had worked. But when she had joined the army she had accepted that she probably wouldn't live to see any kind of old age. Sometimes though, these days when they scored one important victory after the other, she still hoped that she would get to be there when the war ended. She thought that she would like to live in a house on the surface then, and have a child of her own one day, and be there for it all the time because she never had to go out to fight. She didn't like allowing that hope, though, because that was when the fear came back.)

Her eyes fell on Reese. She didn't know if the corporal had any dream about the future of his own. He didn't talk much. But right now he was staring at a stand full of dusty magazines from the days before the war with open fascination, and she thought that he would probably love to see a world like the one they talked about one day. Maybe help creating it. Maybe he would be a historian after the war, collecting knowledge about the world that was lost to them. He was a good soldier, someone she trusted to get her through any danger, but somehow she couldn't imagine him being a soldier forever.

Captain Jones was the one leading their little group. She wasn't here right now, though, but stood outside, smoking a cigarette and keeping an eye on the sky. Destroying the station had confused all the machines around here – some had outright crashed, others had become easy targets that were only able to follow their very simple basic programming and couldn't react to any kind of tactic, however plain, the soldiers threw at them. As far as they knew the immediate area was picked clean of Skynet's agents, but Jones had said that it was never wrong to be cautious, and Janine agreed. Even if it made her feel a little bit less triumphantly safe than before.

Of course, Skynet would most definitely be sending out more machines into this are, but even they could only travel so far. And right now, about a hundred soldiers from two other divisions were on their way here to set up camp in the area, create a base, and keep it out of Skynet's control indefinitely. They would be here before the 132nd and Brewster's 201st had made it out of the city. The only reason why Perry's division wasn't ordered to stay here and do it themselves was because it was too small and didn't carry the equipment for it. Also, it had been accurately predicted that there would be injuries that needed better care than they could provide with what they had on their trucks.

If they made it that far, anyway. There was another base, a very small one, about a day from here, that they would stop at, but the woman from the general's team wouldn't live either way. Everyone else, on the other hand, was not hurt so badly that they wouldn't make it all the way back to San Diego.

As she sorted her way through a bunch of sealed plastic containers, Janine wondered if they would get some time before the next mission. That would be nice.

The containers before her all had food inside, and it was supposed to be very durable if refrigerated. The world was a refrigerator now, but whoever had produced these had not foreseen a duration of over twenty years. Janine knew this stuff from her time as a scav. She could easily sort out those pieces that were useless without having to open them.

Reese was going through the electronics section in the meantime, looking for batteries, and where Wilkins was Janine found out when he let out a whoop of joy.

Even across the room Janine could see Reese brace himself for the impact, seconds before Wilkins threw himself on him from behind, wrapping an arm around his neck and dragging him with him around a corner. Before they disappeared, the sergeant spotted Janine and waved her over. “Ferro!” he called. “Come here! You gotta help me!”

“I thought you got Reese to help you,” Janine complained when she had caught up with them. She had work to do, and they had a time limit, after all.

“No, I got Reese to _see_ this,” Wilkins informed her. “I need _you_ to open it.”

'It' turned out to be a vending machine full of candy. Janine whistled through her teeth. She had rarely seen any in such a good condition. This one looked, underneath a lot of dirt, like it could just continue working once electricity was restored. She suddenly had the absurd idea to take the whole machine with them and pluck it into the generator at the nearest base. Restore a little bit of the World Before.

Money to throw into it was lying around everywhere, so that would hardly be a problem.

“I can't breathe,” Reese wheezed. “So this better be worth dying for.”

“Oh, it is,” Wilkins said, but kindly released him. “See that? Delicious candy!”

Reese frowned at the thing the delicious candy was stuffed into. “What is that?”

“It's a vending machine. One of the non-evil pre-war machines that would never turn against you, and offer you tasty treats if you feed them with money. So hard to find these days – if it's not spoiled, wild animals have gotten to it. I've never seen so much in one place, looking so good.” Wilkins puffed Janine's arm. “And Ferro knows how to open these.”

“I do, but I don't have the right tools for it,” Janine told him. “Did anyone see a screwdriver around?”

“I actually did,” Reese told her. He ran off, through an aisle strewn with dropped products and torn plastic. The animals had gotten here, too, but robust packaging and in one case the case of the vending machine had protected some of the stuff.

Reese came back a few seconds later with two screwdrivers from the tool section.

“One would have been enough,” Janine remarked.

“It's easier to get the front off with two,” Reese told her. He was right, it was, as these things tended to jam, especially after having lain untouched in the cold for so long.

“You know how to crack this?” Wilkins asked incredulously as Janine and Reese went to work on opposite sides of the machine. “You don't even know what it _is_!”

“We sometimes had to disassemble these at the camp,” Reese told him. “I just never had anyone tell me what they were.”

“Cool,” Wilkins said. Janine didn't really feel that was an appropriate response but kept her thoughts to herself as the cover came off and the candy was freed to Wilkins' greedy hands as he started to shove everything into his bag.

“Wait,” she told him. “Half of that isn't edible anymore.”

His face fell. She almost felt sorry for him. “It's not?” He picked up a pack of Twinkies. “How about these?”

Janie shook her head. “Nope, don't eat that. Let me sort through it. These should be okay.” She grabbed a Snickers bar, knowing those tended to keep in these conditions, but was suddenly reluctant to let it go. She hadn't had any kind of chocolate since before her mom died, and she _wanted_ it.

But there were more bars like that in the pile, and that was great, because Wilkins pulled the one she was holding out of her grip and tore off the wrapper before she could make herself give it to him.

To her surprise, he broke the large bar in half, and while he stuffed one half into his mouth without preamble, he shoved the other half into Reese's face. “Try this,” he said around his mouth full of chocolate, before his face twisted into an expression Janine had once seen on the face of a woman on a neighboring cot during coitus.

Reese looked a little sceptically, but it was food and one did not turn down food in the life they were living. He stuffed the piece into his mouth much like Wilkins had, without even trying it for taste first. Janine saw his eyes widen after a few seconds, to a look of amazement and surprise. He probably had never before eaten anything sweet in his life.

“Good, huh?” Wilkins asked. He grinned and there was chocolate on his teeth. “Now let's pack this up, and then we can decide whether we'll tell the others about it or not,” he added with a wink.

Not a kind suggestion, but a tempting one. There wouldn't be that much harvest in the end, after all. Reese went back to his electronics, to then move to the very back of the store where Richards was going through the conserves. Wilkins went to collect the bags of dried, durable food Janine had picked out before he had called her away, and she sorted through the candy, their expert on deciding what was good to eat, and what wasn't. She pocketed one of the snickers bars leaving them with six in the bag, plus some Hersey's chocolate and three bags of skittles. Before she brought the bag to Wilkins, she took out her bar, unwrapped it and ate in, almost in one piece, cramming it down before anyone could come and stop her.

She'd thought Wilkins would be disappointed in the meager output of the seemingly large pile, but he was actually delighted when he looked into the bag. “That's still the biggest collection of candy I have ever seen,” he told her, and Janine silently agreed. Even their camp of scavs had never been able to amass much more than this at one time.

They left briefly after that, five heavy bags full of food and batteries slung over their shoulders and feeling pretty satisfied with themselves. Reese seemed to be limping a little because he had been grazed by a bullet on his hip during the fight, but he never complained, and neither did Jones, who had broken a finger falling awkwardly onto rocks and just carried her bag with the other hand all the way back.

The sky had lit up as much as it would by the time they reached the trucks. They were the last group to arrive, but since they decided to share their candy after all, everyone quickly forgave them. Even so, their harvest was spread pretty thin between everyone on their vehicle. General Brewster gave his share to the dying woman laid out all the way back, near the driver's cabin, which Janine felt was a very nice gesture.

All in all, it had been a pretty good mission. The only thing that she regretted was having to leave behind that vending machine. Perhaps, when all this was over and they could just move freely on the surface and rebuild the world as they wanted to, she would come back here and restore it, and other stuff as well. She was good with the old technology. Maybe she'd turn that convenience store into a museum.

The idea was ridiculous, but for the first time her heart started beating faster with excitement when she thought about what she would do when the war was over. And for once the dread wouldn't come. In this moment, as the movement of the truck lulled her to sleep, she felt like they all were immortal.

  


-

  


As pleasant the summer had been with its temperatures well above freezing and moderate wind, as hard winter hit them when it finally found its way into California. Heavy storms brought heavy rain, then snow and a drop in temperature that let all the water standing on the streets freeze over.

The outskirts of L.A., the areas that were considered relatively safe from the machines that had been driven out of there long ago, where hit hardest by the cold. One unit of five that was just meant to get from one bunker to the next got lost in a snow storm and all froze to death. No one went out unless they absolutely had to for weeks. Until the storms were over and the world was covered in thick, spotless white once again.

General Justin Perry's tech-com unit was not stationed in the outskirts, and for once he was almost glad about that. Almost. Because it was a lot warmer here, near the heart of Los Angeles, but that was mostly because the city was on fire.

Fighting here had been hard, the destruction vast. Sometimes the fires lasted for days. Where they had cleared away the snow they had revealed the ruins of streets and houses, the wrecks of cars and countless skeletons.

It hadn't snowed in days and the ground was still clear here. It made moving around easier, but sometimes Justin wished the snow would come back because he was sick of walking over human skulls.

Right now he was crouched in one of the low bunkers that littered these battlefields; bunkers that weren't meant to shelter anyone for long, just as long a the bullets were flying in their directions. The bullets and the plasma fire, that was.

In the years the resistance had salvaged and improved what technology they could find, the machines hadn't been stagnant in their development either. And earlier this years they had come up with fucking laser guns.

Justin wondered when his life had turned into a science fiction movie.

The army had yet to imitate that, but at least they had finished the improved versions of their explosive charges, so that they no longer killed their electronic devices and caused a bigger boom. Three teams from Justin's division were currently out there, all armed with those new charges, and he sincerely hoped they were as effective as they were supposed to be.

What they were out there for was no big, important mission. It was just their usual struggle. Day-to-day life. They took territory from the machines, the machines tried to take it back, they had to fight the machines off. Nothing special. Just the average action that killed more soldiers than any special mission ever could.

The teams out, of six to eight people, were lead by Andrew, Jones, and Reese. The latter had been promoted to sergeant not long ago and was to get some more experience with leading people on missions. Justin had great hopes for the young soldier, who had probably just turned sixteen this month, or would turn sixteen one of these days anyway. He was dedicated, resourceful, and constantly out to improve himself to meet the requirements of any given situation, or find ways around his own shortcomings and those of others. Also, his ego never got in the way, because as far as Justin could tell he had none. Ironically, it was the last bit that would keep him from ever becoming a member of the top brass that led their army and by extension their species, but Justin still thought that he had the potential to be a good officer one day, and could make lieutenant, or captain, by the age of thirty.

But for that, he had to survive that long, and right now that didn't look so great. This wave of killerbots had been worse than they had expected. Reese's team of six had been surprised by a group of small but powerful machines that had apparently been lying dormant since the last fight. Three had been killed then, one more while fighting the giant H.K. that appeared minutes later and was now rolling towards the bunkers.

Jones' team was firing at it from a distance, drawing its attention, Andrew was engaged elsewhere. He had, before the noise of fighting made communication all but impossible, reported a flying H.K. nearing their position from the east, ETA five minutes.

It would be really great if the one on the ground would be taken care of by then. Justin checked his weapon. He, Naya, and five others were the last line of defense should the others be unable to stop the approach. There were others, in the bunkers left and right of them, but those weren't soldiers, just a few scavengers who had taken the risk of looking for stuff to salvage, and to eat, here, now that the machines were temporarily gone. They were all armed, but Justin didn't want to fall back on them, not knowing what they would do.

An hour ago, he had send five of his own new recruits over to them, to make sure they stayed inside, to keep them from doing anything stupid out of bravado or fear, but also to give them new ones something to do without throwing them right into the middle of danger. It had backfired when two of the human-shaped metal monsters had shown up before they reached their destination. Three of them got shot on the way, one of them a little boy of ten.

This days was going downhill fast.

He raised his binoculars to his eyes again, checking the sky for any sign of the aerial hunter killer, but couldn't see anything but smoke and drifting ashes. Then he saw Reese sprint across the wreckage for the nearest bunker, Ferro following him as the only of his team who was still alive.

The H.K. on the ground rolled into view, just as they emerged from another exit and moved into the shelter of a toppled-over bridge. Apparently it had decided that the long distance fire from Jones' group was not much of a threat. It was one of the bigger ones indeed. And right now, Reese and Ferro were the last ones left to fight it before it reached Justin and the others.

He thought about going out there to help, but it would just give them away and leave their position vulnerable. And he had send for reinforcements from Andrew's a few minutes ago, and had received confirmation that one of them was right now driving their modified car over here, with the heavier firepower it offered. It would come in handy against the flying one, but the one right in front of them was too heavily armored to be impressed by that.

Fortunately, both Reese and Ferro still had their charges. Just now Justin saw them moving behind the rubble, just out of sight of the H.K., obviously planning to stay undetected until they could throw their explosives at it and take it out. The charges needed a few seconds before they went up, so they couldn't be seen while throwing them, else the machines would instantly kill them.

From this perspective, Justin could make out the perfect spot for that, one that would offer sufficient cover while being at the right angle to where the H.K. would be in a few seconds. Apparently, Reese had seen it, too, for he was now leading Ferro exactly there, and just before they disappeared from Justin's view he saw them pull out and their charges.

Timing was essential. The hunter killer rolled towards them, and Justin counted the seconds, assessing when Reese and Ferro would ready their explosives and when they would throw them. The machine was just facing the other way when he saw Reese appear briefly behind the wall of stone they were crouching under, throwing his charge so that it landed exactly in the path of the H.K., who promptly rolled onto it. Perfect. In seven seconds it would be gone.

But those seven seconds would be very long. The machine had not seen its attacker but it had noticed the attack and its top was now rotating in the direction it had come from. If it saw anything of the two soldiers, it would attack before it would blow up.

It shouldn't be able to see anything, though, and without a clear aim it would not shoot. But where was that second charge? Justin was certain Ferro had readied hers as well, but she had not thrown it yet. Why not? Had they changed the plan and decided to save hers for the case that his didn't work? Not a good tactic under these circumstances, but Justin hoped that was what they were doing anyway. Because the window of opportunity had closed. If Ferro threw the charge now, she would give away her position and the H.K. would get her. If it was activated and she did not throw it, it would explode in her hands and kill both her and Reese. Justin bit his lip and did not breathe as the seconds ticked by.

Then Ferro appeared, but for a second, to throw her charge blindly and ineffectively over the wall, and before she fell back out of sight, the machine fired.

The charges exploded. The one Ferro had thrown went up meters from its target, but Reese's blew it up from below, the force busting through the massive frame within seconds until all that was left were smoldering pieces and scrap metal, Justin's curses drowned in the noise.

The look Naya threw him was apprehensive. “What's wrong?”

“Ferro's dead.”

Naya nodded slowly. They she kicked the wall in front of her, hard, and let out an angry scream.

Her reaction echoed Justin's feelings, but there was no time for that yet. (Just like there had been no time to celebrate Ferro's fifteenth birthday three days ago.) Even now, while the pieces of the destroyed hunter killer were still raining down, Reese was sprinting across the now open space towards Wilkins and his car as in the sky above them the aerial H.K. appeared and started firing at them.

Wilkins sped up, following the machine's path, while Reese stood behind the gun mounted to the back of the vehicle and fired at it. Justin took his focus off them for a moment, looking for Sommer, who was stationed nearby with a rocket launcher. Since flying machines were not as heavily armored as the ground ones in order to stay light enough to fly, the rocket ought to be enough to bring that thing down, provided Sommer got a good shot in. He had only the one try, but he was a good shot. If he missed, Reese and Wilkins with the turret mounted to the jeep would be their last hope of stopping it, and they had a hard time aiming the hard to handle gun while the jeep jumped and rumpled over uneven ground.

The rocket was fired, and Justin tore the binoculars away from his eyes so the flash wouldn't blind him. Even without them he could see how, in the distance, the H.K. fired at the ground right in front of the jeep a second before the rocket hit its goal, and the jeep was thrown over by the explosion. He thought it landed upside down, but then all he could see was fire.

He tried the comm, now that the fighting was over and no gun or laser fire drowned out all other sounds, but neither Wilkins nor Reese answered. Justin didn't even curse this time. He just closed his eyes.

  


-

  


As always, there was no time to mourn the dead, of whom there had been too many this time. The machines were defeated for now, but they would be back and the latest attack had left the soldiers with heavy casualties. They needed reinforcements before the next wave appeared, which could be in a week or tomorrow. Until then they had to collect their injured, get the trapped scavengers to safety, rig the area with traps that the machines would hopefully run into, salvage from the wreckage what they could and, of course, take out anything metal out there that was still twitching.

Justin took Takahara and Richards along, leaving the others to guard the entrance to their bunker against anything else that might show up. They left their shelter only seconds after the last shot had been fired, and Justin aimed for the burning wreck of the jeep. Naya knew that he couldn't have much more hope than her, but he owed it to his men to at least check if there was anything to save. She forced herself not to think about Reese, and Wilkins, and Ferro, and the others who had died today, most of whom she had barely known. There would be time for that later. For now, they couldn't be more than fuel for the fury boiling inside her.

She aimed her binoculars at the burning jeep, waiting for the automatic to adjust to the light of the fire before she looked through it. Nothing moved there but the smoke and the flames. Until a shadow dropped into her view, and after a second she recognized it as Sommer, who had run over from his station.

Her heart fell even further. She didn't particular like the corporal, because he was aggressive, unpredictable, and often showed a behavior that bordered on insubordination because he thought he knew so much better. She knew it was his childhood in one of the machines' camps that had shaped him, that it had somehow left him convinced that everyone not from the camps had no idea how the world worked and therefore shouldn't be in a position to tell him what to do. She got that, and she also got that he had a lot of issues and traumas that got in the way of his performance. That still didn't mean she had to like dealing with him.

The fact was, though, that he had gotten a lot better since Reese had joined them. Reese came from similar circumstances, had similar problems, but other than Sommer he had always tried very hard to overcome those issues or at least work around them somehow, to be the best help he could be in their fight against the machines, and that obviously had inspired Sommer to try harder as well.

She could only imagine with dread what the loss of the young sergeant would mean for the most problematic member of their unit.

She activated her comm and tried to reach the corporal, but only static answered her. And the smoke and fire made it hard to see anything. Naya was just radioing Justin to tell him someone else was already checking out the burning car when Sommer's voice broke through the static.

“-hear me?” she made out. Apparently he had been trying to reach them for a while. “I got Reese. He's alive, but hurt. Burns, mostly, I think. Wilkins is dead. I'm coming back now. Hello?”

“I got you,” Naya told him. “We'll be ready.” She contacted Justin, then the bunker below her to have the small medical department ready. There would be more injured soon – at least two, suffering from bullet wounds. Everyone else who had been hit was dead.

For a second she wondered if Wilkins had really been dead when Sommer had found them, or if the corporal had sacrificed him in order to save Reese. It was no secret that he hadn't liked Wilkins at all. If he had to choose, there was no doubt what that choice would look like.

If that was indeed what was happened, Naya hoped that Reese wasn't hurt bad enough to die. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been worth it.

She thought that again minutes later when Sommer and Justin carried Reese past her. The boy looked dead to her, though judging by their hurry he probably wasn't. He was completely limp and part of his clothing was blackened and probably fused to his skin. The smell lingered with Naya even as they were gone and she turned her attention back to the others still outside.

Takahara checked on the burning car once again. The flames had mostly died down and he was hoping to find any ammo for the turret still salvageable. He reported to her that Wilkins was most definitely dead and burned to a crisp, and it looked like he had been torn in half by the impact. So much for that. Naya acknowledged it and refused to think about it, turning her attention to Richards, who was carefully walking up to the fallen terminators, ready to fire should either of them decide to get up again.

As far as Naya knew, the terminators had gotten that name when Connor called them that at their first appearance years ago and it had gotten stuck with everyone. It was fitting enough. They terminated. It was right there on the tin.

Literally.

Later they had learned, through the data they had captured this summer during their attack on the relay station, that they were actually listed as “Terminators” in the Skynet data files, which Naya thought was a pretty odd coincidence, no matter how fitting the name was. These things out there, as far as she knew, were T-450s, pretty primitive models left over from the experimental phase. The ones that had attacked the base in Sad Diego in 2018 had been T-600s – slightly more intelligent and camouflaged as humans with rubber skin and a lot of dirt.

These terminators didn't get up again. They were toast – their systems fried and their outer shells turned into Swiss cheese. Whatever that actually meant. Naya had heard others used the expression, and she was pretty sure that at some point in her early childhood it had made sense to her, but now she didn't know what a Swiss cheese looked like anymore. Probably like something with a lot of holes in it.

It was something silly to think about, but better than thinking about the dead and wounded. She had to think about those anyway when Justin came back up a minute later and she asked him him Reese was doing. He made a vague gesture that meant this could go either way.

Andrew's team came into view shorty after, supporting the weight of two men bleeding from bullet wounds. Both were walking on their own, but one of them didn't look very good. Blood loss and pain did that to a person. Naya watched them disappear underground and turned her attention back to the surface, to watch for any enemy that felt like showing up here all of a sudden. Nothing did. She stayed up on her post with the others for two hours, watching as out there was cleaned up and the area secured. Eventually the parameter was declared secure for the moment and a patrol was send out to keep watch, and only then did she go downstairs into their base where most of the others had already gone.

The place was small, cramped even without any civilians hanging out here with them. Well, not so cramped right now, Naya thought bitterly. She made her way left, to the little room where they kept their medical supplies. Close to the entrance and easily accessible. But so small. There was one cot and three more bedrolls on the floor. Two were empty right now and rolled up to make space for everyone to move. If there were more than three injured, they had to lie in the corridor that was almost too narrow for people to walk past them, and so low someone as tall as Justin always had to duck their head moving through it.

The bunker always smelled of dust and smoke. In here it also smelled of blood and sweat, and ever so faintly of feces. They tried to cover the smell with incense but in a room without ventilation any smell that made it in tended to stay.

Naya tried to ignore it. She hated it, had hated it with every fiber of her being in all the time she had been laid up in a room like this after losing her arm. They said after a while you didn't smell it anymore but she always had. She even had after she got out, as if the damn smell had been absorbed by her clothes and hair and skin. But there was nothing she could do about it so she tried to blank it out.

In addition to the cot and the bedrolls, there was one single chair, that Corporal Smith was currently sitting on, getting treated by James, one of their field medics, for a gunshot wound in his calf. He was lucky – obviously the bullet had missed his bone. It had left an ugly exit wound, though, and looked pretty fucking painful. Naya knew that it was pretty fucking painful from experience. She had been shot more than once.

Never with those nasty new laser guns the machines were now using, though, the way Adams had. The shot had only grazed him by the look of it, and if Naya was any judge from her place beside the door, that was the reason why he was still alive. He had been hit in the shoulder, and the shot had torn out a sizable chunk of his flesh, cauterized the surrounding area.

That, too, looked pretty fucking painful. Right now, Adams was lying on one of the bedrolls, with Roussou, their local doctor, taking care of the wound. He was biting a piece of hard rubber and Naya wondered if he hadn't been given something for the pain, or if it simply wasn't enough.

She hoped they weren't running out. Supply was always a critical thing out here.

The cot was occupied by Reese, who had gained consciousness and therefore was evidently still alive, even though he didn't look like that was something he enjoyed at the moment. Naya's heart fell when she looked at him. He looked like shit. The two-inches-from-death kind of shit. They had cut away his burned clothes, and apparently taken off some skin along with it. His left arm, shoulder, chest and the side of his neck were covered with gauze, but Naya could tell that most of the burn were second rather than third degree, which meant that on top of everything they also were very painful.

Still it was the third degree burns that would probably kill him should infection set be allowed to set in.

That, or the wound in his right side. It was bandaged and blood was seeping through, which was probably the reason why he was lying on his back rather than his side, even though by the look of his his back was burned as well. The H.K. had used laser fire, which meant that wound must have been caused by a piece of the jeep going through. Naya pressed her lips into a thin line and forced her attention to Justin, who was kneeling beside the cot and currently asking the kid what had gone wrong with Ferro.

“Slipped on the gravel,” she could just barely make out the reply. Pressed out painfully between forced breaths. “Fucked up the timing.”

Such a little thing. Just loose stones and gravity. Naya could imagine it now. There must have been enough time for Ferro to know that once she threw her charge she would die, but if she didn't they would both die.

She just hoped that when the time came for something to mow _her_ down, she wouldn't see it coming.

Justin took a water bottle and tried to make the boy drink, but before he could get anything down he passed out again. Justin and Naya stepped out into the corridor a minute later, and the smell seemed to follow them out.

“What's the prognosis?” she asked, meaning all of the patients but mostly Reese, who was the only one she really knew.

“Smith has just as flesh wound. Bled like hell, but if they cleaned it right he should be okay. Won't be able to walk very well for a few weeks, though, so we can count him out for the time being.”

“What about Adams? That looks pretty bad.”

“It is, but luckily he was only grazed, otherwise he would be as dead as Ferro. She basically exploded.”

Naya shuddered. “You saw it?”

“Mostly. We need to find something to counter those plasma guns with, or the war will take a turn I do not appreciate.” Justin looked grim. “Even like this, the tissue damage is severe, Roussou says. Not fatal, if Adams gets the right treatment, but dangerous enough. And we're almost out of antibiotics.”

Naya's heart sank. She knew where this was going. “There's not enough for all of them,” she guessed.

Justin nodded. “And they all need them. Smith doesn't look bad, but his wound can easily get infected. Roussou isn't going to risk it.”

“Reese needs it more,” Naya pointed out.

“Yes. But Reese is also the one lest likely to survive even with antibiotics. Adams will likely die without them and very likely live with them, if he gets a complete treatment.”

“So Roussou is going to give him everything.”

“Except a little for Smith, yes. It's the only choice he can make.”

That was the way of the world. Naya restrained herself from kicking the wall beside her. “What about our reinforcements? Can't they bring more?”

“They will. But they won't arrive for days, and by then it's probably going to be too late.” Justin looked at her and where Naya was filled with helpless anger, he only looked tired. “So I'm going to go in there now and the next time he is awake, I'll ask Kyle if he wants to try this without antibiotics or if he would like me to put him out of his misery right now.”

His voice betrayed nothing, but Naya knew that this had to be hard for him. Justin cared for his men, felt responsible for their well being, and tried to keep them safe – especially the young ones. She also knew that he had a particularly soft spot for Reese. Then again, it was hard not to.

Her commander and old friend turned to do what he had just said he would, but not without asking Naya to go to their communications room and inform HQ about their latest mission and their latest losses. It was not something that she was looking forward to doing, but at the same time she would rather do it a hundred times before going back into that room that she had just escaped.


	24. 2026 - 1/4

The sky was black. Not the black of a dark night in summer when there was no snow to reflect their lights against the clouds. Not even black like the ceiling of a bunker when the lights were out. It was not a blackness that engulfed everything; just the sky stretching above them like a black blanket fluttering in the wind. Like a carpet of smoke, whirling and angry.

Like snakes, Andrew Jackson thought to himself. Winding snakes, or the waves on a shore, rolling and crashing, over and over and over and over. Endlessly. Devouring.

Yes. Devouring. That was the word the had been looking for. Hungry. They looked threatening, wild. Menacing in a way the sky hadn't looked in a very long time.

And yet it made him think of all these things that he hadn't thought it was possible he could miss so much. He looked up and the sky seemed to hold a promise. Of change, or, if that was what it wanted, an end.

It was the fact that it was day that made the black sky so different now. It shouldn't be black, but it was. It wasn't all dark in the world, but it was much darker than it should be. And above them the wind was howling and tearing at the clouds. Down here it was almost calm in comparison. The worst of the storm had passed. The rain was gone. But in the distance Andrew already heard the rolling of new thunder.

No, this wasn't over. This was the beginning of something.

Andrew looked up at the sky and smiled. It felt like the world was ending all over again. The last few weeks had been full of downpours, thunder and lightning, ruins that held on for decades finally giving in under the force of the wind. And yet he felt strangely calm in the face of all that, almost content. If anything, he felt exhilarated, as if excited for the things to come.

Beside him, John growled softly, and Andrew lifted his binoculars to his eyes, the old wound in his side making the movement painful in a way he had long since learned to ignore. In the distance, too far away for his companion to see, he made out a group of figures moving through the storm, their scarves and coats blowing in the wind. All adults, all tall and strong, like people who had lived a pretty easy life before they had left whatever shelter they had to do it in. Dust partially shrouded them, made them little more than shadows, but even so Andrew didn't need to see them clearly to know who they were.

“You're right, of course,” he told John. “Those morons. I hope they never learn.” As if any human would walk that upright through a storm like this.

He activated his radio. “Terminators coming down West Street, about eight hundred meters from here. Looks like 600's to me, maybe 650s.”

“Got it,” a distorted voice answered. Andrew leaned back, lifted his visual aid back up and watched the terminators as they approached his position. They were just close enough to make out the flaccid lifelessness of the 600-series in their faces when the ground in front of them exploded, taking the first two out. A group of soldiers showed up from the ruins to their left moments later, firing at them.

The plasma fire that had such devastating effects on human bodies was almost as devastating on the artificial bodies of the machines. The ambush worked. Before the terminators could fight back, all were destroyed.

He was still watching when he sensed movement to his right. John made no sound so he didn't bother looking for another few seconds.

When he did, he saw Reese kneel beside John, scratching him between the ears. The dog, named after their ever-vigilant general, pushed his head into the touch and looked decidedly smug to Andrew.

“You look satisfied, Sir,” the young soldier noted.

“I am,” Andrew admitted. “Carnage. Destruction. No blood. Good view.”

Reese nodded. “They found another group aiming for the bunker near City Hall a few minutes ago. Walked right into a trap.”

“Awesome.” Andrew grinned, then nodded at the soldier's gear. “Heading out?”

“Yes. In a few minutes. The Captain says there's no point waiting for better weather.”

“She's right. The storms have been going on for weeks.”

Reese looked up to the sky and Andrew looked at him. Imagined all the scars hidden by the clothes and tried to find anything uneven about his movements that gave away lingering pain or weakness, but there was nothing. Reese had always been remarkable adept at controlling physical discomfort. “I have never seen weather like this,” he said, sounding more fascinated than worried, even though anyone felt a certain apprehension at the sight of the black clouds dancing above them.

“I've heard talk about how this weather is caused by changes in the atmosphere,” Andrew told him conversationally. “The atmosphere is heating up, and the warm air hits all the cold air and that causes the storms.” He crossed his arms behind his head. “Of course,” he continued, as if it didn't really matter, “that would mean that somewhere the bloody sun has actually made it through the clouds, otherwise no warming up could happen whatsoever.”

He watched the young man closely, but Reese was busy staring at the sky as if he expected the sun to come through at any moment, right now. And yet his face gave away nothing. As if he thought that if he let himself get excited about it it wouldn't happen. Or he thought that showing excitement about the end of eternal twilight would be taken for a sign of weakness. Hard to tell sometimes. He didn't fool Andrew either way. It was all there in the tightening of his hands in John-the-dog's fur.

Andrew for his part allowed himself to be as excited and gleeful about this as he bloody wanted. What was the point of fighting this war without a little optimism?

Behind Reese, Naya came into view, and Andrew sat up in mock alarm. “John,” he said to the dog. “Captain Rhodes is coming! Run! Run for your life!”

John looked at Naya and panted with his tongue hanging out. He didn't show nearly the appropriate amount of alarm. Then he let himself fall against Reese, who snorted softly and didn't seem appropriately alarmed either.

Naya stood over them, her frown visible even in the dark of this day, and Andrew could hardly remember what she had looked like at fourteen. “Is this what you call keeping watch?” she asked in a voice that matched the sky.

“I do. I am guarding this poor innocent creature from you.”

Naya had greatly disapproved when Andrew and some of the others had named their new dogs two years ago. Giving them names made people too attached to them, she'd argued, and being attached to the dogs would just make them sad when they died, or be tempted to waste resources they needed for human patients to keep them alive, or it would get them killed trying to save them when the bunker was on fire or terminators got inside. She had voted for just numbering the dogy One through X, but Andrew knew he would like this one as much as he did if his name were Seven.

Regardless, he was aware that the animals weren't pets, and that his priorities had to lie elsewhere. And they did. But that didn't mean he had to deny himself any kind of affection for them. Dog's weren't the only creatures killed in this war – they weren't even the creatures most likely to be killed. Next Naya would advise him not to become attached to the people around him anymore, and then he would end up like her: trying desperately to look like he didn't care while caring way too much and unable to show it.

And not bloody fooling anyone. Everyone knew how much she hated any kind of medical facilities, and the tiny rooms of their previous tiny bunker in particular. And yet she had been there almost every day when Reese had been laid up there for weeks and months, fighting for his life with the single minded determination Andrew had come to expect from him, because, as Justin had paraphrased it, he might just make it, and then he would be around to help with the next battle, and even if he were to die then, he might just do it in place of someone else.

Justin and Andrew agreed that the kid desperately needed something to live for other than destroying as many machines as possible and the chance to die another day. Of course, the world hadn't exactly offered him, or anyone else, a lot to live for. The sun coming out might just change that. Maybe, if plants emerged and the dust finally settled, the young ones would finally see that the planet could be more than a graveyard.

Or maybe some kind of love life would help. Andrew grinned to himself as Naya called Reese over and the young sergeant left the dog with a final pat on the head and joined her in her track down the slope to where the rest of her troop were waiting. He was eighteen now and had, as far as Andrew could tell, brushed past puberty without showing much of an interest in anyone. Of course he had spend a lot of the past one and a half years in a hospital bed, trying not to die of infection, so that probably was a factor there. In fact, this would be his first big mission after having been released, as he was barely done getting his strength back.

Still, in Andrew's opinion, that wasn't much of an excuse. This world was shitty enough, they had to get their enjoyment where they could. Then again, kids these days tended to have other priorities. Like staying alive. And destroying metal monsters.

Sometimes Andrew amused himself by imagining the youth of his own day in an army like this. It would be one giant orgy. The machines wouldn't even have to bother with stealth, they could just walk into the hormone and testosterone filled bunkers and mow everyone down and the entire war, at least, would have been over fairly quickly and without much of a struggle.

Or not. Andrew was well aware that he wasn't fair to the teenagers of the Old World, one of whom had, once upon a time, been him. He knew just as well that sex wasn't everything and that this was not a time and a place for romance. He knew that love just made it harder to accept death when it came, which too often it did, so love was not exactly the ideal everyone was running after that it had been in his youth. He knew he had been very lucky to fall for a guy so long ago who was still conveniently around.

And he knew that all the young people in the stories he told to the younger ones for entertainment wouldn't even have the stamina to keep an orgy up long enough for Skynet to come and murder everyone. But the thought amused him none the less.

That was what decades without television could do to a man...

He sighed and resumed his watch duty. There was nothing on the horizon. John was quiet, probably missing Reese already, and there were no evil fake humans around to distract him. Andrew patted his head and stared at the area through his binoculars for a little longer, seeing nothing but dust being dragged up by the wind. The weather was vaguely apocalyptic right now (or what people had called apocalyptic before the apocalypse actually happened), but it would be abysmal later. With rain. And while it was getting a little warmer, it wasn't exactly cozy. But Naya was right – there was no point in waiting for better weather. Not if they wanted to make their rendezvous.

For a while Andrew followed the path of the group with his binoculars. There were eleven of them, carrying backpacks and guns, and explosives. They walked through the dust until it swallowed them, and of course they walked on beyond that point, but Andrew could no longer see them. The storm was picking up. The thunder was getting louder.

They would take a truck when they reached it, and if they were lucky it would happen before the rain started. They would not be back for a long time.

There were several outposts of the machines that were located on both sides of the ring currently controlled by the army. Small stations where the machines could recharge their energy cells, go through maintenance or receive new orders, new programming. New information on the hide outs of the rebels. They had grown in numbers since the army had started successfully disturbing the wireless transmissions, and they were small and hard to find. Naya and her team would search for them, take them out where they had to. If they managed to get to them undetected, though, they were to try and put their own information in there. Change the orders, feed the machines with false information. It was an experiment. If it worked, they could hit the machines hard, provided they were patient and played their cars well.

It was hard to estimate how long this trip would take, but two to four months seemed to be generally what they had to plan in for this. The team would move from one small auxiliary bunker to the next, finding provisions there. Most of those bunkers were unmanned, just there for emergencies or to offer shelter if the next real base was too far away to reach in one night. Their truck they would have to leave behind at the first one, to avoid detection. It would be an uncomfortable few months for them, and yet, Andrew wished for a moment, as he searched for their shapes in the dancing dust, that he could go with them.

The first drops of rain started falling minutes later. The dust was dragged down by the water, clearing the view. The day got, if possible, even darker, until the first lightning flashed across the landscape.

Andrew pulled his stretched out legs underneath the shelter of his roof, using his hands to pull in the left that was largely unresponsive and mostly numb due to nerve damage. His days of hiking long treks were over. So were his days of running towards or away from enemies. He'd made it off the battlefields with all this limbs attached, but what was the point if those limbs were bloody useless?

Oh well, he thought, leaning back against the rocks that protected their bunker. It was better than being dead.

  


-

  


The station was hidden underneath the ground and out of line with the other stations they had found so far. It was running on an independent power cell that would only activate when a machine came close, so it emitted basically nothing that their sensors could pick up and was also invisible. They only found it because Smith noticed that the machines had cleared a path through the rubble here for their bigger models but had, for some reason, left out that one pile of stones that was just ever so slightly in the way.

There were no machines around. They had not seen any since yesterday, when they had seen a bulk of them move in the direction of their base a long distance away. They had not called the others to warn them. Communication was forbidden to them outside of emergencies that would force them to abort their mission, because as they had gotten better at intercepting signals, so had the machines. The watch posts around the base would find them, if they didn't run into one of the patrols first. Those machines were not their problem.

This station buried beneath the dirt was. Reese knelt beside it, carefully removing a layer of earth from a panel while Smith told him what to do. Sommer was with them, keeping an eye out for approaching enemies, but everything was quiet. Hardly anything came by here, ever, but not remaining watchful could quickly cost everyone their lives.

Everyone else was waiting elsewhere. Captain Rhodes had not send out any more than were absolutely needed. This was not a stop where they were to destroy the station but where they were trying to reprogram it. Not in ways that where immediately obvious, just a little bit to see if they could. If they did, they could do so much more damage later if Skynet didn't know about it.

The sun was setting behind the clouds that still covered the sky as if they meant to do so until the end of time. They were of a lighter color today, almost white, streaked with yellow and brown rather than gray and black, and the day had been as bright as no day had been in a very long time. But at the horizon new dark clouds were towering; the onset of a new storm. That was why they had come out so early: they were racing against the weather, and out here, where there was little shelter from the elements and in a place that literally called to the machines, they couldn't allow the weather to win.

So they had to be quick, and it was a gamble because they hadn't done this before and didn't know how smooth it would go, if it would go at all, or how long it would take if it did. So Sommer kept his eye on the horizon and Reese kept unscrewing panels and holding tools as Smith told him to with a feeling of nervous dread that didn't have everything to do with armed enemies.

Smith had been a technician in another life. He knew how to fix or upgrade machines, if not exactly this kind. This kind he only knew how to dismantle, with explosives or bullets. But he fixed the generators in their bunkers if they needed fixing, and while he was recovering from his injuries and not allowed to go on missions that took him further than half an hour away from their base, Reese had helped him lay new power lines and repair radios. Now Smith was staring at the insides of a machine build by machines for machines and cursed. But he also looked fascinated. Then he went to work – hesitant at first, as if he only hoped that he knew what he was doing, but wasn't entirely sure.

But he did it quickly. Attached things. Cut things, then fixed them. Reese tried to watch and understand but he didn't even know the names of most of the parts. For all that he lived in a world dominated by machines, Reese didn't have a lot to do with tech-stuff, unless one counted carrying equipment. He could fix a radio after helping Smith with it so often. He could even restart a generator – but then, every person who had sturdy booths, or at the very least sturdy toes, could. He could hot wire a car. He could not manipulate machine power stations to reporgram hunter killers into doing their will. But he could protect the person who could, and as long as he and Sommer did that, he didn't have to have any of the other skills.

The horizon stayed clear of machines, if not of thunder clouds, in the time Smith needed to get his job done. Reese helped him screw all the plates back on and then they hurried back to where the others were waiting, almost two kilometers away in a shallow bunker that was not meant to house anyone for long but would have to house them for however long this storm lasted. The rain started falling just seconds after they arrived, hitting Sommer who was the last one to slide inside.

There were two exits, one east, one west. Two rooms only because a wall had to be erected running through the center to hold up the ceiling. They were only a meter underground, barely protected from any attack. This bunker was meant to hide people, and to shelter them from the weather, not from the enemy's weapons arsenal.

And even the protection against the weather was precarious at best in this case. The rain came down heavily, and it didn't take long for the water to start running down the slope from the exit that didn't entirely close. Being aware of the problem, Captain Rhodes and the others had build an improvised little wall out of the rubble outside to keep the steady flow of water from flooding the entire bunker and making it even more uncomfortable than it was anyway, but it worked only so well. A little water still got through. It was manageable. A little deeper in the room that was not very deep at all the ground was still dry.

They spread out their bedrolls – not to sleep yet, but to have something to sit on. This storm would keep them here for hours, quite possibly the entire night. Even if it was only most of the night they wouldn't be able to leave here, because then they wouldn't make it to the next shelter before the daylight exposed their presence. And then they would be stuck here for another day. Reese was aware that that was very likely.

They wouldn't be able to stay another day after that. The supplies of this bunker would not last through the night, and the supplies they were carrying with them would only get them through another one. After those were gone they had to risk either the storm or discovery making their way ten kilometers south to the next bunker that hopefully was fully stocked, before they got too weak for that.

Until then, they were quite literally stuck here. They couldn't even post a guard out there to warn them of approaching machines. All a guard could do was tell them doom was coming for them, and possibly get spotted and give away their position. If a few small machines came they would be able to defend themselves, but for anything bigger than that, they were sitting ducks, as Rhodes had called them – whatever that meant. So their best strategy right now was to stay low, keep quiet, and hope the storm passed quickly.

It was not a strategy Reese liked. Laying low, hoping nothing happened. Leaving it to chance. He hated being helpless.

There wasn't much for them to do but sit down and listen to the wind, the rain. It was cold and damp, and dark. One of the entrances didn't completely close, so any light they made inside might be seen from the outside. There was some talk, but it was subdued. Reese leaned against the wall behind him, drawing his knees to his chest and huddling deeper into his coat. He ached all over, but didn't pay it any mind. He wasn't as strong as he wished he was yet, and the trek from one power station, from one bunker to the next was exhausting, but he would have preferred it to sitting here, doing nothing. Cold and dreading what he couldn't see outside.

Since they didn't know how long they would have to be here, they were already rationing food. The hunger did nothing to make Kyle feel any better. And in this near-total darkness, there was very little to distract himself with – not from the physical discomfort but from the thoughts and memories it brought.

That day, he slept early. There was no watch to keep and nothing to do. He had nothing to contribute to the few conversations that were quickly moving into territory he was not at home in. Terra incognito, he thought. Something he'd read somewhere. A dead language, but he liked the sound of the words, the way they flowed.

He tried to focus his thoughts on words, words with patterns and melody, words that were safe. He focused on the heavy exhaustion in his limps, the way it seemed to drag him down in a way that wasn't dangerous and felt like relief rather than pain. He woke up screaming anyway.

They left the next evening. The sky was clear of thunder and lightning, but not clear of clouds. The clouds were dark, almost black, and there was no wind but it felt like the wind would come back, soon and hard. There were no machines, but the machines were always somewhere.

The light faded slowly. It was summer and the days lingered. They walked swiftly to the long stretch of ruins melting into a long stretch of rocks, finding some cover there from the machines that were always somewhere. Darkness did not come quickly enough, and the clouds above them were weird, all thick and dark but also bright at the edges, forming patterns and shapes Reese had never seen before; that no one had seen in decades.

Just before the shadows where thickening to the point where they could call them night and feel a little safer, one of the fading bright edges of the clouds on the horizon flared up one last time, and far away the light of the setting sun touched the ground.

  


-

  


Their mission was nearing its end. In the past three months, they had traveled in a wide circle around Los Angeles and had destroyed, disabled, or manipulated dozens of service stations for the machines. In the past three months, they had slept in auxiliary bunkers or between ruins, had braved storms and starvation and enemy attacks and lost only two people, one of whom was still alive.

In the past three months, summer had passed.

The nights were longer again, the days shorter, the wind colder. The sun had not been seen again by any of them after that evening in July. They spend their days inside, hiding, and rarely left their hiding places while there was a chance to see the sun if it were there to be seen. The machines were taking that from them, too.

Maybe there were stars above them now, sometimes. If there were, they never saw them. No moon, either. Maybe the clouds where finally thin enough now, and the night sky was just full of nothing.

No one talked about it. Not much anyway. Not as much as Reese had imagined something this monumental would be talked about. Yet he didn't talk about it either, feeling, perhaps, that if he let himself acknowledge that he had seen that, that it had happened, he would allow himself excited about, and thus vulnerable to, something that he might never see again.

His usual tactic of not thinking about it didn't work this time, and he never really tried to employ it. He thought about it all the time.

They spend the first day of their last week out in another flat bunker, the ceiling so low he could barely stand upright, and packed almost the brim with provisions: dried or canned food, ammunition, batteries, blankets, clothes. This was not just a bunker for shelter but a storage. It was deep below and they could light their lights and talk at a normal volume. It was camped, barely offering enough room for the few of them, but it was comfortable, too. There was always something to sit on that wasn't the floor and might even be soft.

They were talking – not about the sky, not about the sun. About all sorts of things. The older ones were talking about the world before the war, as that was the only world that offered things worth talking about in an environment like this, where everyone was exhausted and at least a little afraid and needed to hear something good. (Sometimes, people around Reese's age talked about the childhood, about games they had played with their siblings or friends, about things their parents did that were funny or good, but they always inevitably fell silent with that look on their face that made everyone else grow silent, too. Reese never talked about his childhood at all.)

Smith talked about Sarah Connor for a while, John Connor's mother, and Reese closed his eyes and listened, losing himself in the words that helped him not to think about anything else. He liked the stories about Sarah Connor best of all, liked the idea that even before the war there had been someone fighting the machines, even if ultimately she had failed. She had still left them with a legacy in the form of the training she had given her son, the preparation that later enabled him to fight the machines in her place, when they had come and she was gone.

This story was about one time, when John had been very little, when she had been living among outlaws in a country named Mexico that was very warm and dry and hard to conjure up in Reese's mind. Smith wasn't a very good storyteller, but he didn't need to be; Reese had heard this story before. And someone always quipped in to fill in the gabs in the narrative. It was a little different in the end than the first time Reese had heard it, and it made him a little sad to think that a little bit of the truth, of the woman Sarah had really been, got lost in every retelling, when everyone speaking of her added a little bit of what they thought she _should_ have been.

He wondered who she had really been. If she had really evaded the police the way she was said to have that day in Mexico when she had gone to a mall to acquire car parts because her group was stranded and she was too impatient to wait for supplies to come in. Had she really saved her companion in that manner from arrest, or had it never happened like that? Had it happened at all? Had she been alone? She had wanted those car parts so her companion could teach her how to fix a car, so that she could later teach it to her son. That part, at least, Reese believed to be true.

And yeah, on the run from the law, she had probably been that impatient.

Reese was also impatient. Not right now, in that he couldn't wait for the day to end, for them to be able to continue and complete their mission. That happened often, but not now, when he was almost comfortable and stories about the greatest hero they had never known washed away everything else. But generally. When he had a hard time waiting to start this task or finish that mission because they never knew what the machines were doing and how much time they had to get things started or done. If the stories about Sarah Connor somehow knowing about the upcoming war were true, she must have felt the same way. About everything.

The topic of conversation changed at some point. Reese wasn't sure when. He had drifted, and now he let himself drift off again. He woke up three times before the evening, shaking and disoriented, but he never reached for the gun put safely out of reach, nor did he make any sound loud enough to wake the other sleeper. One time he woke up to the screams of someone else.

Three hours before sunset, they received a call from HQ, and since communication was kept to a minimum for this mission, everyone awake listened intently. Reese did so while collecting his equipment and giving everything a quick inspection, especially his light weapons. He was right to do so – HQ warned them that a bulk of machines was moving in their direction, and unless they wanted to be stuck in that bunker all night and consequently another day, they had to leave it now.

They did. Half an hour later they were on the road again, Captain Rhodes having decided that the landscape around here offered enough cover to allow them to travel across it in the last hours of daylight. They stayed in the shadows of rocks and hills, the city before them but looking impossibly far away in the dust blowing across the rocky hills before them. Steve Palmer, who had lived in this area before the war, told them that it hadn't looked like this in his childhood, that the bots must have rearranged the landscape somehow. Ina Peters, the field-medic, told him something had rearranged his brain somehow. Reese wondered which one it was.

They just had to get out of the way of the machines, far enough not to get noticed. There were too many for them to fight, and even if there hadn't been, fighting was not what they had been send out to do and they only did it when they had to. This time they did not have to. Those machines, though, they were headed somewhere. They were going to harm someone, or someone else would have to fight them and get hurt or killed. Reese had learned to accept that, and to trust his comrades to get through fights alive even if sometimes they didn't. Not doing anything, turning their backs to the danger to someone else, was still something he found hard to do.

The sun was setting. Unseen. The light was fading, but it was still there, still strong enough to make out the stones and the earth and the tiny blades of green peeping through it as Reese climbed a hill to have a better look at the horizon. He did not look at the horizon now.

The green was very slim and not very long. There wasn't very much of it, and it was covered in dust. Reese crouched beside it, wanting to brush the dust away but afraid to touch the plants that were so valiantly growing their way into a land that did not want them. Grass, he thought. This had to be grass, that used to grow everywhere. He tried the thought and it felt weird in his head. He had seen pictured of grass. He had never seen grass.

Then the sight before him blurred, for a second, and was clear again. A drop of water hit the small patch of grass right underneath him although it was not raining, and Kyle knew he was crying. He couldn't feel it. It was cold, the wind was cold, and his cheeks were numb.

The light was fading rapidly. Reese touched the blades of grass after all, his fingers numb, too, where the tips emerged from the fingerless gloves. He was so used to that, he had never considered it a problem until now. He always felt them across the trigger of his gun, was always able to handle his equipment, feel the pressure of buttons and the length of wires even when it was much colder than this. He had never touched anything worth touching before, and these tiny plants were light and yielded to the pressure of his fingers, however lightly, without any resistance, and it was like they were not there at all.

There was more. Beyond this little patch of grass was more grass, more patches, splattered over the hill, just beyond the rocks. Between the rocks also splattered about the hill that fell gently before him. Now that he knew what to look for he could see it. And he wanted to wander down there and confirm it, see it from up close, but Ina came up from behind him before he could climb to his shaking legs, asking what was taking him, if there was something wrong.

He looked at her and he was still crying. Then she was, too.

And then she was yelling down the hill behind them, calling for everyone else to come up and see this.

  


-

  


Three of the machines traveling north changed direction and came upon them just after nightfall. Three hunter killers, one flying. They were big. They were, ultimately, defeated, and no one died, although there were injuries. The hill, where the young grass was struggling to live, was hit by heavy fire in the course of the battle, and the spreading flames burned away anything that the shock waves of explosion had left behind.

  


-

  


The snow started late in September. The latest John had seen for nearly thirty years, and for once he focused on that and not on the fact that they were in California and it shouldn't snow here at all.

Not long ago they had had winters that lasted for years. He didn't allow himself the luxury of believing that just because this year had brought back a hint of sunlight, everything would steadily get better now.

Weather was one of the things he had not studied before the war, so he could not reliably predict changes in the world climate. He just knew that things were never as easy as they were hoped to be.

They were never any kind of easy at all.

So for now he would take the fact that it hadn't snowed until late September. And it had started slowly. And yet, by early October it was snowing thick, white flakes steadily for so long that the world outside once again looked like it had been winter forever.

At least the wind had stopped for now. For the first time in weeks the air was still outside, and the cold not quite as cutting due to it. It still froze everyone's breath in front of their faces, and John knew that a month from now it would be so cold the air would seem to coat his throat and lungs with ice every time he breathed in. It would be a time when all missions that went out for more than a few kilometers from the nearest bunker would have to travel by vehicle, otherwise people would freeze. The thought didn't worry him too much – they had lived like that for decades. But it would be an inconvenience, compared to what the summer had been like. And it was dangerous, and people, likely, would freeze, no matter what precautions were taken. It didn't worry him too much, but it didn't exactly make him happy, either.

There were missions planned that would take people out there, in vehicles and without, to distances depending on the protection they could offer, because there always where. There were missions that had to be postponed due to the weather. Postponed for months – if the winter was as it had been before, maybe for years. Only that wasn't possible. They were getting closer and closer to seriously damaging Skynet's defenses, and they couldn't take a break from their attacks. The machines would not lay low to the winter. Too long between one crucial mission and the next, and all damage could be fixed, opened roads could be closed, and years of work and sacrifice would be for naught.

He sighed and the breath froze in front of his face. It drifted up, towards the sky, turned invisible in front of clouds of the same color. Bright gray clouds shining before valleys of deeper darkness, a night sky from the past. The moon was just barely visible, peeking out from behind a cloud and a layer of dust, but full and bright enough to send its light all the way down to earth. Where the cloud cover broke it got even colder, but that was a price John was willing to pay.

The light got reflected back by the snow, making everything so very visible. The night offered little cover right now; John could have read a book in this light if he had wanted to and had the time. It didn't matter much, at least not to them. They were standing right on top of their HQ, in an area cleared long ago, guarded, and still not known to the enemy. They were as safe as they could be as they waited, together, for the others to arrive.

Troops from all over the country were supposed to arrive here soon – not whole divisions, there was no room for that many. But commanders traveling with a handful of trusted men, coming here not for the next big mission, the next hard blow against Skynet that would kill hundreds of them but hopefully turn the war, but simply to talk. Exchange experiences and facts, come up with ideas, and hear about some plans that had never come up in radio communication. It was a kind of exchange that was impossible over long distances with never more than three people talking to each other at the same time. And also, they were very sure that their communication lines were secure, but there was no absolute certainty on that, ever. So what would come up here were things better not thrown out where Skynet, by whatever small chance, could hear it.

They had done this only once before, years ago. By now, the war had progressed to a point where the advantages they could gain from this justified the risk of having so many leaders in one place.

Or so John hoped. If their lines were indeed insecure, they would soon find out because he couldn't imagine Skynet would pass up the opportunity to take out so many of their commanding officers, including their General, at once. Of course they were watching the sky, the land around them. Their base was a fortress now. The machines wouldn't be able to kill them all at once, else John wouldn't have called for this. But there was a chance that the next days would be very unpleasant.

There were escape routes that had never been mentioned on the comms, for just this reason.

But, if he was honest with himself, John didn't think Skynet knew about this. He didn't tell that to anyone, not wanting them to feel safe just because they thought he could see the future, but for the moment he didn't expect any drama. No machine related drama, anyway. There was of course the drama that would inevitably happen when a lot of high ranking officers who were used to working mostly independently were sitting in the same room together for days.

So right now, John didn't think there would be greater danger than the yelling, shouting, and ego trips that could be expected from a meeting like this. And even if Skynet attacked, it would wait until everyone was here. That was why he was standing outside now, in plain view of anyone who knew where their camp was. And that was why he allowed his daughter to stand here with him.

Or rather, run around around him. Louisa was thirteen, a young teenager in another time. She had always seemed older than her years, too calm and focused and mature for the childhood John and Kate had tried to give her, but now she was running around like a little girl, inspecting rocks, taking off her gloves to let the snow melt in her hand while watching in fascination, and looking up to the sky a lot, as if expecting it to break open at any moment. She hadn't spend a lot of time outside in her life. Maybe that was where her childhood had been meant to happen.

John watched the lines of rocks and ruins around them for any sign of their guests, but so far no one had shown up. The first ones were expected any moment, but he didn't mind them taking their time. It left him some time to be here, breathe in the cold, clear air and watch his child, rather than watching for incoming plasma fire. Someone else was watching the area for them. They had surveillance devices and early warning systems all over the place, and guards were securing the area in a wide parameter. That he couldn't see any of them right now didn't mean they weren't there. He and Lou were in a sink hole surrounded by rubble and couldn't see very far, and it was also very possible that whoever was around was simply giving them some space.

One of the side entrances to their bunker was but fifty meters from John, but even knowing it was there he wouldn't have been able to make it out from here.

“Dad!” Lou called out from somewhere to his left. “Look!”

John did look at her, already starting to walk over to where she was, but she was coming back to him, so whatever she wanted to show him wasn't something she had found in the rocks. Instead she was looking up, at the sky.

John followed her gaze in trepidation, expecting a machine between them and the clouds, but it was only the stars, peeking through a gab in the sky.

In all the years they had never been visible, they'd still always been there.

John had never learned the constellation. It was never something that had featured into his mother's idea for his education, and he'd always been too focused on other things than to know any more about the stars and their formations than that they existed. But if he were to recognize any constellations up there, and if there were enough sky visible for constellations to be recognized, they probably would be exactly the same as before.

For a long moment John stood, his arm around his daughter's shoulder, and watched in silence as the clouds drifted over this gab in the sky and closed it again, hiding the stars. But he and Lou, they knew they were there now. And no one could take that from them.

Their shared moment ended with the arrival of the ones they had been waiting for. Four figures appeared out on the edge of the area, half hidden by rubble. John head them before he saw them; their steps heavy on the hard snow. They didn't speak, but when they saw John and Lou, one of them lifted his hand in greeting.

John returned the gesture. He couldn't make out who these men were yet, or if he even knew them at all. There were some high ranking officers who he had barely, if ever, met in person because they were stationed far out and had stepped in as replacements for others who had been killed. That whoever this was was accompanied by only three others surprised him, though. He wondered if they had run into trouble on the way here. He hadn't heard anything about that.

Instinctively, he drew Lou closer to his body, made weary by the infiltration of the terminators years ago. He didn't think these were machines, as they would never have passed the guards or the metal detectors with their rubber skin, but it was always wise to be too careful rather than too trusting.

Three of the guys were tall, and underneath the tons of equipment they were carrying they were strong and broad shouldered. Their stride was very even. John told himself that he was being paranoid. Then he told Lou to go inside.

She didn't have a chance to do so or to question it before the shots started ringing out through the night. John immediately threw himself over his daughter to shield her and was distantly surprised not to feel any pain to bullets hitting his back. More gunfire, but none of it seemed to go their way. He dared to look, his hand reaching for his own weapon, and saw a group of four storming down the slope firing at the two figures who were still standing. Hitting them over and over again without bringing them down. Two more soldiers came from the other direction. John saw them out of the corner of his eye but all his attention was on the one terminator that was still facing him, and was now bringing up his gun to fire. There was no way John would be able to fire first, and his handgun wouldn't do anything against that thing anyway. There was no cover to hide behind. In a moment he would be dead, and all he could hope for was that the others would destroy those machines before they could also kill his daughter.

The terminator fired, but one of the soldiers coming from the right was faster. Not in destroying the machine, but in getting between it and its target. John could only watch, helplessly, as the man shook from the impact of one, two bullets, and then sank to his knees. The machine took new aim. The sacrifice had brought them only seconds.

But seconds where enough. Before the terminator could pull the trigger, both machines exploded under the force of what John could only assume was a grenade launcher. Bits and pieces were blown everywhere, all the way to John and Lou, and he recognized the energy cell that landed, burning, only ten meters away from him, just in time to throw himself over his daughter again before it went up.

Hot pain flashed across his face when he didn't turn it away quick enough, so intense that he saw stars, and then had to blink a few times, surprised that he still saw anything at all. He could feel the blood run down his cheek, his nose, covering his mouth, but it didn't cover his eyes and while there was a piece of metal embedded in his arm, he was still, miraculously, mostly unharmed. So was Lou. She was scrambling away now, and was, after a second, grabbed and dragged towards the bunker by a soldier yelling about having to get inside, about how they didn't know if there were more.

The doors to the bunker had opened. Soldiers were coming out, alarmed by the fighting that had lasted less than a minute. They would be needed to look for more threats, but first Lou and those injured had to be brought inside.

This included John, he realized, now half-blind from blood running into his eye after all. And the soldier who had shielded him and Louisa from the bullets. The man wasn't dead (yet), still holding himself upright on his knees and trying to get back to his feet. John pulled him up as soon as he made it over there, supported by another soldier who appeared on the man's other side. Together, the three of them stumbled over to the entrance of the bunker, and John was glad that by pure coincidence all this had happened near one that was located not far from medical. When they made it down the ramps and the stairs, the man they held between them was barely supporting any of his own weight any more and the pain in John's face and arm was rapidly catching up with him, but there were medics waiting for them, recognizable as such only because John knew them, and one of them relieved him of his burden while another led him deeper into the bunker until they came to a crate John could sit on.

He heard Kate's voice before he saw her. When he saw her, she was heading towards the injured soldier who had been sat down on a bench near the entrance and was still supported by the soldier who had come with him – a woman, John now saw, and one who looked vaguely familiar although he didn't know her name or whose division she belonged to. Kate said something to the injured man and the man said something back, still conscious and alive. John dared to hope. Even as Kate said something to the one holding him and they gently guided him backward until he was lying flat on his back, and his hand slipped down and fell to the floor with no strength left whatsoever, and there was a lot of blood.

John's own hand, the good one, balled to a fist, and he kept watching his wife, and her team, and the man who had saved him and Lou and was probably dying, from this great distance while someone cut off the sleeve of his jacket and cleaned the blood off his face and told him something about stitches.

While he was being taken care of, two men came with a stretcher and carried away the soldier, who by now wasn't moving anymore. Kate looked up once before she followed them to her treatment room, hers and John's eyes meeting over the distance. Her eyes widened when she took in all the blood, but he waved to signal he was okay and she nodded and left. The other two soldiers who had been injured by the terminators were still here, in this broad hallway, getting treatment for comparatively minor wounds. A bullet in a woman's thigh, leaving a nasty flesh wound. Burns and cuts over a man's face and hands, from the explosion. John didn't know either of them. Someone would have to clean up all this blood.

John added plenty of his own. He turned down the offered painkiller, knowing it would be needed more elsewhere, and bit on a piece of plastic as Bill the medic sewed up first his arm and then his cheek and forehead and lip. The entire left side of his face had been cut up, he was told. It was pure luck the shrapnel had missed his eyes.

He didn't know how long he had been there. At some point he wondered where Lou had been taken, but then he saw her come in to help take care of the woman with the gunshot wound in her leg. She didn't seem to notice him. John dressed in the new shirt someone handed him in silence, wondering distantly if there was a point in trying to fix his jacket. It was a good one, very warm, allowing for movement.

It was nice to be wearing something not soaked in blood again. It was cold so close to the exit.

Somehow his thoughts were sluggish. John wondered if that was the blood loss or the blow to his head when the pieces of exploding enemy hit his face. Someone handed him something to drink and he drowned it without hesitation. Not water, No matter. There were terminators out there and maybe they would have to evacuate this place. He should be taking care of _that_.

How much time had he lost? It felt like a long while, but probably was more like ten minutes. But ten minutes were a long time if they were under attack.

No one was panicking yet, or even in much of a hurry. These people could act without him and there were others who would make decisions when he couldn't, and to whom the situation would have been reported by now. So they probably weren't under attack.

So what had that been, then?

General Perry showed up just as he was ready to get up and take care of things again. John looked at him and distantly noted that he wasn't surprised in the slightest by his presence here. So it had been Perry's group that had just arrived and saved their asses. John's heart sank.

“What's the situation?” he asked.

“We didn't find any other machines out there. Seems this place is safe for the moment.”

“Those terminators found us. They would pass the information on to the rest.”

“If they had the chance. No transmissions but your own get out of this area, and you know it. We think the terminators came here by coincidence. They were traveling with two guys we think belonged to Erickson's group, who had been separated from the others a while ago. And they looked human – like, completely human, skin and all, so I guess those guys bought the story of lost wanderers or whatever and took them right here.”

“Did they tell you that?”

“No, they were the first the terminators took out when we showed up. I just speculate here from what I know.”

“What do you know?” John asked, irritated that he had to ask for every bit of information. So Perry told him how he ad his men had seen the small group from a distance and immediately guessed that in contained terminators from the way they moved, but hadn't wanted to go in guns blazing for fear of being wrong and for fear of getting the two human soldiers killed. Also, they hadn't been in a good position to attack, needing a long time to catch up without being seen. They hadn't been able to warn the base because they were already in area where all radio communication was blocked, When they saw John and Louisa, they decided to attack anyway before the terminators could identify John and kill him.

The terminators probably hadn't identified him, or he would have been the first target and died quickly.

“How sure are you that the terminators couldn't pass on the position of the base before they were destroyed?”

“How sure are you that your scrambling signal works?” Perry asked back. “We're fairly certain, but Hernandez has everyone prepare for evacuation anyway, just in case.”

John nodded. He would have given the same order, if anyone had bothered to inform him. None of this would have happened if Perry and his team had attacked sooner. Before the terminators could come here and fire in the direction of John's daughter. “One of your men shielded me and my daughter from the attack,” he mentioned. “Got hit.”

Perry nodded, his lips pressed into a grim line. “Sergeant Reese,” he said. “Good soldier. Damn shame.”

John closed his eyes only for a second. “Is he dead?”

“Not yet. Doesn't look good, though.”

A wave of dizziness washed over John as he stood and dissipated quickly. “I'll go see him.”

“Yeah.” Perry nodded, as if he had expected nothing else. “If you wanna do that, Sir, you should do it _now_.”


	25. 2026 - 2/4

Someone filled Kate in on the basics of what had happened just now, just outside their doors, while she rushed to her clinic in the wake of the stretcher carrying the man who had, for all she gathered, just been shot by a terminator. She didn't let the terror that word evoked slow her down. That was a problem the army would take care of. She would take care of this soldier here, for as long as she fucking could.

There had been an attack by terminators, and John and Louisa had been out there, and someone (the female soldier who was sticking to their side?) told her that this guy here had saved them. It shouldn't matter to her from a professional angle, but it did. Kate didn't think about that. She thought about blood loss and shock and organ damage and about how this boy looked barely older than Jeannie.

Jim was waiting from them when they reached medical, ready to assist her. With him waited Gina, their new trainee, already handing Jim scissors so he could cut away their patient's clothes while Kate took his pulse to see if he was still alive. He looked dead. But when she touched his neck he moaned softly and his eyes fluttered as if he were trying to wake up, and Kate was _not_ going to let him die.

Jim cut off the clothes they could cut off, and then they carefully removed the bulletproof vest the boy was wearing. Kate allowed herself no relief at seeing it, because she also saw the hole in it and all the blood. Once they had removed everything obscuring their view and wiped off the blood, Kate saw that the soldier had been hit twice. One bullet had hit him just above his left hipbone, just underneath the vest, entering thy body unhindered and exiting in the back. The other bullet had gone through the vest beneath his sternum, and for all Kate could see right now it was probably still inside.

“We need blood,” she told Jim. The pool on their treatment table was still growing, though no longer as fast. “We still got some O-type left – unless someone knows his blood type?” The question was for the other soldier who was watching them anxiously. She shook her head. Jim didn't move.

Kate looked at him, ready to snap. Seconds mattered here. Jim looked back with an unreadable face. “Kate,” he said. “There is no point.”

“There is always a point. This is not a lost cause.”

“It probably is.”

“You can't know that without trying.”

“No.” He was still infuriatingly calm, but his voice was hard. “But I know that all the blood and medication we use here will probably be wasted. We're low on O-blood and oxygen. How many people are you willing to let die for this experiment?”

“I'm not willing to let _this one_ die,” Kate stated. She turned to Gina who watched with wide eyes and told her to go get the blood, and the drugs. The girl hurried to comply. Jim glared. Kate glared back. “I'm going to get that bullet out now,” she said. “You can either assist me, or you can get out, in which case the chances of him dying and all this being wasted are even greater.”

Jim continued to glare, and for a moment Kate was convinced he would leave. Then Gina came back and he wordlessly prepared a transfusion.

  


-

  


It took hours to get out the bullet, stop the bleeding, repair all the damage as best they could. By the end of it, Kate and Jim were covered in blood and the patient was not saved; he was merely not dead. Time would tell if he'd pull through, and there was a high chance that he wouldn't. Kate had no illusions about that. She would do her best, though. She owed a debt.

Jim had done his best, too, but he wasn't happy about it. Wasn't happy with her. Kate looked at him staring at her, darkly, from the other side of the table, and remembered the kid he had been when she'd first met him. How eager he had been to join her team.

“When someone doesn't have high chances of survival, we let them go,” he told her now, his voice hard. “That's how we handle it. That's how we keep enough supplies to save the ones we _can_ save.”

“I'm aware of that.” Kate did her best to stay calm.

“Then how do you justify that man still being alive?” Jim snapped. “He's probably going to die, and all the resources you used on him will be wasted. How will you justify that, then?”

“He got hurt protecting John. Your General. Without whom we have no chance to win this war,” Kate pointed out. “That should be worth more than a bullet to the head.”

“Sure. But that goes for all the other people who heroically sacrificed themselves as well. What gives you the right to decide that this one has more of a right to live that the woman who took a bullet for me last year? Who I had to put out of her misery because we agreed that her chances weren't good enough? If this one gets to have a chance, why did we have to kill Charlie, or Betty?” He was still not yelling, but he looked like he wanted to. “You are walking a thin line, Kate,” he told her.

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?” She knew what he meant.

“People respect you because you take the same risks and make the same sacrifices as everyone else despite your status,” Jim said. “And now you try to save this guy even though you shouldn't, because he saved your husband and daughter. Don't give me that shit about Connor being our leader, you did this because it's _your_ family. And by that you tell everyone that your family is more important, that their lives are worth more than others.”

That wasn't what Kate believed. But the man _had_ saved her husband and her little girl, and she _did_ feel she owed him. She thought about the young soldier just after the war, the first one she had seen get killed even though he might have been saved. Hardly older than this one. She remembered how helpless and angry she had been at the unfairness of that. The memory had left her alone for a very long time but now she could hardly think of anything else. That boy back then had been hurt protecting them and as a reward they had killed him, and Kate had been helpless to do anything about it. Now this boy had been hurt protecting her loved ones, and this time she was able to at least try to help him, and fuck everyone who told her she shouldn't!

“Everyone who has the chance to help someone they owed this much would do the same,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, But you're not everyone. You're Kate Brewster. You're supposed to be better than this.”

She wasn't Kate Brewster most of the time. She was whoever people needed her to be, and right now she was tired of it. And she did see his point and it changed nothing. “Evidently, I'm not.”

“No, you're not. Right now, you're abusing your power, and you better hope no one outside this room hears about it.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Are you serious?” Jim asked incredulously, and Kate realized, without being able to care, that she had offended him. “Do you think I'd go and rattle out out? All other things aside, we got enough enemies outside, we don't need to create conflict here. But that's what you're doing! People are already talking because you won't let your daughter join the army, and now this. You're going to lose a lot of support here if anyone learns of this, and it might just as well be for nothing.”

“Jeanette has joined the army,” Kate reminded him, pointedly ignoring everything else.

“Yes, now. And she spend years in training and is still mostly just doing guard duty nearby, while any other kid would get a few weeks of weapons training before being send to the frontier. What, did you think people wouldn't notice?”

“Did you think,” Kate asked, “that I wouldn't notice that _you_ have never served in the army at all?”

It was the wrong thing to say, and she knew that before she said it. Maybe later she would feel bad. For now, she just stared at Jim and waited from his reaction, hoping it would involve some form of shutting up.

He did shut up. And left a minute later. In that minute he said something else that Kate didn't care to remember. Then he was gone and soon Gina would come in, and Bill, and Hannah, who had to be long since done with taking care of the other injured people. Like John. Kate had caught a fleeting glimpse of her husband before coming here and he hadn't looked good. He hadn't looked good, and she probably should go see him, but her team was capable enough to take care of his injuries and she couldn't leave here. Not just because she had to take care of her new patient, but also to make sure the others wouldn't let him die once she was gone.

Although that boy dying would make things even worse, as Jim had indicated, as it would _prove_ that Kate had acted emotional and selfish. So Jim was now forced to do everything he could to save this life. Unfortunately, Jim was gone. Kate had made sure of that.

Gina, who had been on a supply run, came back a minute later, while Kate was sitting beside her gray-faced, very still and very unconscious patient, measuring his pulse and trying to assess his chances. They weren't good, but her experiences with cases like this were limited. Usually, if someone was this badly hurt, they _would_ let them die, and so they didn't really know what to expect.

Of course there were the ones who were conscious and wanted to try and fight death on their own, without the medication and other resources the medics wouldn't risk on them, and Kate and her team took are of them the best they could, but in those cases they did little else than make them comfortable while watching them die. This was different. And at some point Kate would have to sit down and examine her own motivations for making it so.

Not now. Now she had work to do. Gina told her that John had been by while she was in surgery and would come back later. Good. Then she could have a look at him while also keeping an eye on the injured soldier whose name she still didn't know.

None of the other soldiers who had been hurt in the incident had been by here, so their injuries probably weren't that bad. The woman who had been with her patient when he was brought in and who had to be kicked out earlier so she wouldn't be in the way came back to see how her friend was doing.

She gave Kate an update on the situation outside. Everyone was getting ready to evacuate if necessary, but so far there was no indication that they really would have to. Good. All other things aside, the injured soldier wouldn't survive an evacuation.

The woman was called Jones. Her comrade was called Reese. Kyle. Kate needed a long moment before she remembered why that name sounded familiar. When she did, she remembered the dirty, emaciated kid who had once tried to protect Casey from his own parents. Kate shoved the memory down until she had time to deal with it. Hannah came in, and eventually Jim came back, still glaring, still angry, and followed by John.

He looked like shit. Dried blood stood out in brown smears across his neck where it hadn't been wiped away properly, and angry red lines interrupted by black stitches ran across his face. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was pale and gave away nothing. Kate knew that he had to be in a lot of pain. She also needed to give him something to avoid infection, unless someone else had done that already.

They needed more antibiotics. Not right now. But soon.

John stood before the bed, before the unconscious soldier who was fogging up the oxygen mask with painful gasps and didn't know yet that he was still alive. His face face away nothing. “Are we still safe?” Kate asked, before his voice could.

“So it seems.” His voice didn't give anything away either. He didn't look at her, and Kate looked at her supplies, getting the pills she needed for him. “We will remain careful, and our bags will remain packed.”

“Of course.” She had expected nothing less. The next weeks would be tense, if they weren't filled with them running. “Here. Take these.” Kate had to take John's hand and press the pills into them. He looked at them, then at her, briefly, then back at the soldier. Reese. Kate wondered if he knew who that was, if he remembered. (They had never talked about that incident again; him blocking her every time she tried to bring it up.)

“How is he?” he asked now, his voice like an automatic announcer from an ancient telephone.

“Not good,” Jim answered before Kate could. “Probably dying. Going to eat up an awful lot of resources on the way there, and it's not going to be fun for him either, going this slowly.” The words were for Kate, who glared at him with her eyes and did nothing with her face. They were for John, too, who was supposed to put an end to his and tell Kate to let this boy go, for the good of everyone, making the choice he always had to make.

John didn't look at Jim, as if he hadn't heard him. He looked at Kate, briefly. Only as long as it took him to say, “You'll do all you can to save this man.”

Kate found herself nodding before it even sank in that that hadn't been an observation, nor had it been a suggestion, or a request. It had been an order.

Jim said nothing. John turned around and walked away.

  


-

  


They never had to evacuate. If Skynet did find out where they were, it either didn't feel the time for an attack had come yet, or it didn't think it could get them all at once. Most likely it didn't know where they were. Everyone stayed vigilant, but after a while the tension became background noise, became habit. They had always been tense and nervous anyway, if they weren't too exhausted to care.

Kate spend a lot of time exhausted. Things were easier now than they had been in the early days – they had more medics, more resources, and more bases. Not everyone who got injured ended up _here_. A lot of people still did. And people still got sick, and sickness still spread, even though they were now faster with isolating the ones who showed signs of contamination. Some days were better than others and some were very bad. The ones when a big mission went down or went wrong were still the worst. If Kate had a few minutes to herself, she didn't know what to do with them.

Jeannie was gone most of the time. Lou didn't need her anymore. Kate didn't have much of a chance to raise her daughters these days. She now grasped at chances to get to know her daughters, but there weren't many. Lou was spending a lot of time in medical – she was spending a lot of time everywhere, but medical was her favorite place. She didn't like fighting and violence, but the aftermath didn't bother her, and being able to help those people who protected them made her happy. But somehow she was rarely around when Kate had a moment to spare.

Casey was around more, but he was still very young, and compared to his much older sisters he was a shy child, who liked to keep to himself and out of the way. Kate often felt that even though they no longer moved every few years, and things weren't (quite) as hard as they used to be, and there were more people around who could help her take care of him, or take care of her work so she could take care of him on her own, she got to see her son even less than she had ever been able to see her daughters in their early childhood.

It wasn't just her lack of time. It also had to do with the fact that Casey was more withdrawn than her girls had been. Kate and John had tried hard to let the childhood of Jeanette and Louisa be as carefree as possible, and while they still had grown up in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, surrounded by death and despair, she felt like they had managed to give them at least some sense of security. A lot of that probably came down to the two of them always being together, watching each other's back, being playmates. In that sense, Casey was almost an only child. His sisters were too old. He rarely ever saw Jeannie, and while Lou was a good babysitter when she had the time, and loved her brother, they couldn't interact on anything like the same level and as far as their mother knew never tried.

And Lou and Jeannie had other friends. Crissy was almost like a sister to Lou, especially now that Jeanette had other commitments. Casey not only suffered from a lack of other children roughly his age, he also never tried to connect to anyone. And as much as Kate and John tried to give him the same sense of security his sisters had had, it seemed like he already knew far too fell how broken the world was and could not forget it even for a moment.

He was a difficult child. No, that wasn't true. He never disobeyed or caused trouble, other than the trouble of not knowing where he was because he was hiding under a table somewhere. But he was a child with difficulties, and Kate couldn't help him with that. Not the way she should. She didn't have the time or the energy for the effort it would take to make a difference there, and sometimes she despaired over that and used her few minutes of free time to cry. She would rather use them to connect with him or tell him that the world wasn't as bad and hopeless as it seemed, but for that he had to be present, and she couldn't always convince herself it wouldn't be a lie.

Right now, Kate could see him, sitting on the floor of their storage room, a stack of papers on his lap. Doodling something. He didn't look unhappy, was consumed in whatever he was doing, and Kate knew he wouldn't appreciate being disturbed now, so she contended herself with watching him from a distance for a while.

What time was it? She felt like he had come here from the two hours of lessons that counted as school nowadays half a day ago, but when she checked her watch, it wasn't nearly as late as she had thought.

There were days where time ran through her fingers and everything had to be done at once. There were days when time was at a stand still and they never seemed to end no matter how much she wanted them to be over. There never was a day that was just the length a day should have.

Since the sun never rose or sank underground, time was measured by the need to be somewhere else or do something at ome particular moment, and the whole concept of days didn't apply here, anyway.

Her gaze traveled on, took in this space. Her space. This space where she ruled supreme as long as people respected her and relied on her to take decisions from them and forgot that she was the same as everyone else, with the same flaws, the same weaknesses.

She had three rooms here, not counting the storage. Pure luxury compared to places they had stayed before. The first room was the one where she, or whoever was on duty at the time, welcomed people who came to them for help, checked them over and treated them. They also performed surgeries here, in a corner that could be closed off by a plastic curtain they had installed just a few months earlier. It had lifted morale, she felt. People here weren't easily shaken, but not everyone was happy if they came for an infected cut and had to watch Giselle saw off someone's foot in the background while Jim cleaned their wound.

This was the main room, the one where most of the action happened. It was also the place where the desk stood that they worked on when they had to and could. The papers they had on their patients were stored in the next room, though, in a lockable cabinet, beside the lockable cabinet that held the medication they had at hand here. That room also held the injured or sick people who had to stay at the clinic for a while. Sometimes for days, rarely for weeks. Sometimes until the end. But for those people who where on their way out but didn't want anyone to finish it for them, they had the third room.

It was small, and they used it for whatever they needed an extra closed off room for at the moment. Sometimes for people. Sometimes for other things.

Right now, it was empty. There were two beds in there, build from crates and mattresses, and fitted with clean sheets. Waiting for the next person who would need them. Occasionally, Kate or one of the others took a nap there during particularly busy times. Occasionally, Casey did. Once or twice, John had, when he urgently needed to talk to Kate and she wasn't available yet, and he also urgently needed to get a few minutes of rest before heading out again. Right now, the only person in there was Hannah, sorting through the two boxes of medical supplies they had received from a troop returning from Los Angeles.

Kate thought about going there now, to stretch out and close her eyes for ten minutes. She didn't know how much longer she would be here. There wasn't much going on, but someone always had to be available, and Hannah would be busy for a while. Louisa could man the main room, keep an eye on her brother, and get Kate if anything came up that she couldn't handle on her own.

At this point, there was a lot the girl could do by herself. Louisa was about the same age Kate had been when she had started to train as a doctor, and Kate liked to think her daughter was smarter than her, and more in tune with this world she had grown up in. But her interests were also broader. While Kate had been laser-focused on medicine, Lou was laser-focused on everything. She made a great assistant, but Kate could already tell that she would not end up a doctor. It required a devotion to only one thing Lou didn't have and did not appear able to, or want to, develop.

She currently was in room number two, where the long-term patients were recovering. There were only two at the moment, but while neither of them needed immediate attention, they needed someone to keep an eye on them at all times in case something happened. Especially Kyle. For a while Kate had to fight a battle every day against Hannah and Jim to keep him out of the small room, where they put the hopeless cases so they could go in peace. And while his condition was more or less stable these days, he was far from well, or out of danger.

Three weeks had passed since the incident that had landed him here. Only for the last eight days had he been conscious for any length of time, and able to remember it afterward. If ten to twenty minutes counted as a “length”. Still, he was anxious to leave. Kate didn't worry about that, because at this point his ability to get any part of him out of bed was basically non-existant.

She'd worry about it later.

People from his division came by almost every day. They were stationed here for the moment, a snow storm having locked everyone inside for the past ten days. Some of their visitors had left before the storm, giving them all a little more space, but Perry's team was still here, and Kate was glad. They helped her sometimes, if they had the time, and they were a good support against Jim and his opinion that Kyle should be dead. Apparently his comrades really liked him. Kate wasn't even surprised about that.

For most of the time, Kyle was dead to the world. A lot of the other moments he was feeling too miserably to be much of a conversationalist. And in the times in between, more frequent now but still moments to be treasured, Kate had found out that he simply wasn't much of a conversationalist. He barely ever spoke unless spoken to, and his responses to questions tended to be short and to the point and probably not entirely true when it came to just how awful he was feeling. No, that wasn't it. He described his pain in reliable detail if probed. He just didn't give the impression that it mattered all that much.

While he rarely ever spoke – partially, for sure, because of the pain he was in – Kate found that he tended to follow everything that went on around him with attention and interest when he was able to. In fact, his focus on her every action while caring for someone else was so great that she once found herself explaining to him what she was doing and why without him ever having to ask any questions. He seemed grateful for the information, even though she had no idea what he was planning on doing with it. Then he had passed out halfway through her changing his bandages and for half a day his fever had gotten so bad she had thought that was it.

It had been up and down with the boy since he had ended up here. It still was. Kate still would not leave him alone for any period of time, or allow any of the others to do so when she wasn't around. Someone always had to be in that room, or the door had to be left open. It was another reason why she was grateful for his comrades' visits.

They had also told her, in idle moments, about their lives out there in the Wasteland around Los Angeles, and about things that Kyle had done in the time they had served together. Kate had been wondering on and off in the past years, about the boy she had met in her examination room that day. Mostly, she had wondered if he was still alive. Now she wondered where all those scars came from, and what he might be dreaming about when he tossed weakly in the grip of another nightmare.

The scar on his palm from breaking the glass bottle that day was still there.

There were also burn scars all up his side, shoulder, and neck. A young man named Eric Sommer had explained to Kate that Kyle had been caught in a fire a few years ago and had been hurt too badly for the medics at hand to invest any precious resources into his survival. He had opted to try and fight for his life anyway, rather than taking the easy way out, and had made it. The story seemed to vindicate Kate in her decision to save him. It also made her feel a lot more optimistic that he was going to live.

He knew that all the medication and effort would be wasted if he died, Sommer said, so Kyle would do everything he could to stay alive.

Right now, none of the other soldiers were with them. They were preparing for a mission from what Kate had heard. They wouldn't yet head out to return to their division currently operating somewhere north of Del Mar, but were to do something in the vicinity of this base, to return here when it was over. It probably had something to do with clearing the area of any hostile elements that had come closer during the snow storm that was even now delaying everything they did. Kate had asked Miranda when she'd been here the last time, but had been distracted when the answer was given. It wasn't that important. Important was that they would be back here soon.

Hannah was taking a break now. Giselle was making rounds through the living quarters to check on people who wouldn't or couldn't come over to the clinic. Li was dead. Jim was on break, too, and Bill had left a while ago to be a field medic when Colonel Flynn's division had lost too many of theirs. At this moment, Kate was alone here in terms of medical personnel, but that wasn't a problem, as there was not much going on. Her last walk-in patient had left fifteen minutes ago, and there was no one to take care of but Reese. Casey kept her company – sort of – from his spot in the closet and would alert her to any new arrival should she have to leave, and Lou was in the other room, keeping an eye on Kyle.

When Kate went in there to check on them, Lou was sitting on the edge of the bed, her legs swinging just above the ground. She wasn't very tall for her age. She wasn't short, but she wasn't tall either. She looked so much like John it amazed Kate sometimes, when the light caught her right, but already she could tell that her girl would always be a good bit shorter than her father. That didn't matter. What mattered was that she looked happy in this moment, or at the very least content. She was leaning over Kyle, who was awake, and was telling him something. Sometimes he said something in return, his voice too weak to be heard over this distance, and then Lou would answer whatever question he had asked, in that rambling way she had when she was feeling good and could talk about something that fascinated her.

Kate watched them from the doorway for a while, not making her presence known. Lou didn't seem to mind being here when she could be elsewhere, doing more interesting things. She'd never complained when her mother had asked her to help care for the young soldier who had been hurt protecting her and her father. Gratitude probably had a lot to with that, but now it seemed she honestly enjoyed spending time with the guy, making up with her chatter for all the conversational skills he didn't have.

Of course lack of skill wasn't the only problem here. Lack of strength also played into it. Kate wondered if she should step in and make her daughter shut up so Kyle could get some rest, but Lou was already slowing down, her voice taking on a different quality and getting quieter. As Kate watched, she slowly trailed off and eventually fell silent.

After another minute, Lou stood and turned around. Kate could tell from her stopping short that she really hadn't noticed her mother standing in the door.

“Hi Mom,” she said. Quietly.

“He's asleep?” Kate replied, equally quietly, nodding in the direction of her patient. Lou nodded.

“There's not a lot to do here, and I guess that gets pretty boring. Kyle doesn't stay awake for long a lot, but I think he's glad when I talk to him until he falls asleep. He sort of gets upset when he doesn't have anything to distract him. I mean, he doesn't say, but you can tell.”

Kate couldn't tell. She hadn't spend as much time with the young soldier as she would have liked, and when she did and he was awake, they were interacting so he didn't have a chance to get upset for lack of distraction. She believed her daughter, though. Lou was usually pretty perceptive in these things.

While Kate hoped that Kyle would get stronger quickly, she was also worried about when he did. From all she had heard about him, he wasn't one to take well to staying still quietly, and even if he recovered quickly, it would be a long time before he could leave here. She worried that he would try before he was ready. She also worried about him thinking too much with nothing to do, now.

Maybe it was time to collect some good books for him to read. If he even liked reading. The last person Kate had here for an extended period of time had tried out of boredom, but found that no novel could hold her attention for long enough for her not to be bored to tears.

She also worried about what would happen should his fellow soldiers leave this base before he was strong enough to go with them. Or worse, when he was strong enough to leave with them but not strong enough to survive the trip. But Kate would have to deal with that when the time came. If the time ever came.

For now she settled for being grateful for her daughter and her keen eye for what was needed. And for her son, a minute later, when he ran in to tell her that someone was nearing this place through the corridor to the west.

That someone, it turned out a minute later, was John. Casey was delighted to see his father but stuck close to Kate as if intimidated by his presence. If John noticed, he didn't let it show. Lou greeted him from the door, then turned back to the bed when it seemed that all the commotion had woken Kyle again. Kate left the door open, in case she was needed, but also in case John wanted to talk to the soldier who had saved him and their child now that he was aware enough for a conversation. So far he hadn't been here, not after that first day, and considering how adamant he had been on Kate saving the man, that was a little surprising.

She thought he had come for that now, but her dear husband never made more than three steps into the first room. His eyes flitted towards the open door, but didn't linger there, setting, instead, on Kate.

His hair was messy, as if he had only just woken up, or as if he had been wearing a hat. She suspected the second option, as he was also wearing a heavy coat that had snow sticking to the shoulders. His cheeks were red. The w ind was probably still very biting.

It didn't surprise Kate that he had been outside, even though there was little to do or see in this weather. He'd been getting stir crazy, locked in here as he was. She'd have thought that he would enjoy the excuse the storm gave him to not do anything big while it lasted and instead spend more time with his kids. But so far the only difference to the times when he was out on missions for days and weeks was that she found him working at his desk in their room more often when she came back from work. Seeing him was still something special for Casey. Lou evidently had stopped expecting anything more a long time ago.

John hadn't come alone. Kate only noticed Miranda Jones and Estelle Marini after a moment, since they had been standing behind their General and only fully entered the room when it became obvious that he wasn't going to. This was a surprise after all. Kate had thought Jones would be occupied preparing for her mission – but by the look of it she was already done with that. The woman seemed ready to go, was even carrying her weapons, and if the kids hadn't been there and Kate hadn't been distracted by John, she would have chewed the Captain out for that, because weapons were not allowed in medical and everyone knew it.

Major Marini was even more of a surprise. The woman belonged to John's team, and by the look of it she had been out there with him just now. She was around Miranda's age but had only been with the army for a few years, with John for about two, and Kate had not seen her here often. She had come by to check on Kyle a few times, though, despite not knowing him. As far as Kate could tell she was just really grateful that the kid had saved her leader from certain doom. Kate didn't know much about her, but she knew that Marini had been incarcerated in one of the camps John's army had freed for a few years and basically worshipped the ground he walked on.

Both women nodded at her and then proceeded into the other room, where they exchanged some quite words with Lou and then with Kyle, who didn't seem to say anything back. When Kate turned to look at them, they were looking at John as if expecting him to join them and when she turned back to look at John he looked somewhere else.

At Casey, to be exact. Who was kind of hiding behind his mother still. Kate remembered behaving that way around strangers when she was a child.

“What's going on?” she asked. “Do you need me for something?” Since you obviously haven't come for anyone else, she didn't say.

“No,” John said. “I am about to head out to supplies to take stock for the next mission. The storm is getting weaker and we have a lot to do. I wanted to see if Casey wanted to come help.”

Casey shifted. Kate looked down and he looked up at her, his eyes wide, asking for permission. Obviously her opinion would overrule his father's here, but just as obviously he really wanted to go.

“You need to ask Casey that,” she said none the less, and John did, and Casey nodded with more enthusiasm than doing inventory was worth. This wasn't about taking stock, though. It was about spending time with his dad and the fact that his dad wanted to spend time with him. Kate got that. She would have liked to spend some time with his dad as well.

As her six-years-old ran over to his his father, Kate allowed herself a moment of sadness that she did not allow herself to show on her face. She was used to not seeing John a lot, to not spending a lot of time with him. He was constantly busy and so was she. Their business was always the reason why they didn't see each other much. Except now John was stuck here with half as much to do than usual and they saw each other even less.

“I also came to tell you that Jeanette will be back in two days,” John continued with a brief grin that let Kate forget her sadness for a brief time. “Her team is stuck in a bunker right now but they'll get moving this evening and be here by Friday.”

“Oh.” That was news worth hearing indeed. Jeannie had been gone for weeks, and while Kate knew that she wasn't send on any kind of dangerous assignment, anything could happen out there. On top of that was the weather. What gave the people in their main base a chance to rest by forcing inactivity on them endangered those who had to wait out the storm in the smaller bases and bunkers that weren't as well stocked. The army had decades of experience with endless winter, though, and Kate knew that the bunker Jeannie had been stuck in had supplied for about a month, give or taken, for both food and heating. There had been constant contact with her team throughout the storm, and John had kept Kate updated. It still made her feel a lot better to know that her daughter was fine and on her way back.

John and Casey disappeared, leaving behind the two women who were just now talking quietly with Louisa. Kate noted that Miranda's hand was stroking the hair of Kyle, who had apparently passed out again. It needed washing. So did hers. He needed to stay warm and still more than he needed washed hair.

Compared to the state of his hair when she had first met him, it was practically sparkling. Even though it was pretty long again, falling almost to his shoulders.

Kate wondered if he'd let her cut it again later, when he was feeling better. She wondered that with a small smile, being in a much better mood than she had been before John told her about Jeanette's imminent return.

Her good mood took a damper a minute later when she asked Marini what they had been doing outside just now and Marini told her.

As it turned out, her and John and some of the others hadn't been outside just for the heck of it but because the transmission lines were down. The storm had damaged the buried cables to transmitters far from their base that relayed all their signals so no one could determine the position of their HQ by picking up the transmission, and for days they hadn't been able to go out and fix the damage. Which meant that for days they hadn't received any reports of those out in the field.

Which meant that for days, John hadn't actually known if Jeannie was okay or not, and he had not bothered to tell her. Because he'd wanted to protect her from worrying, or because he didn't think there was anything wrong enough to be worth the hassle... It didn't matter why. Kate felt her anger and irritation rise again.

And then it faded. Deflated. Anger was fuel and kept her going, but it was also a limited resource, and for the moment Kate had simply run out. So her husband had wanted to protect her from worrying about something that she couldn't have done anything about. Let him.

So it was with a feeling of tired resignation rather than irritation that Kate called over her daughter to let her know that her brother was gone and Lou couldn't leave medical until someone else came back to man the place with Kate.


	26. 2026 - 3/4

Hannah got sick. It was not the kind of sickness that killed, but it was the kind of sickness that kept her from being able to work and from being allowed anywhere near patients with fragile health. Times like this, when one of them was down, Kate was especially grateful for how big her team had grown over the years. They also reminded her that they were still understaffed and after Billy had left, losing even one left them struggling to gab the time until their return.

So it meant they all took a few more shifts, a little longer. It didn't matter that much. In busy times they never got to take a break. This was still a good, quiet time by their standards.

In the last week there had been an injured hand due to a carpeting accident, a scalded thigh due to a cooking accident, two cases of illness and one case of frostbite due to being an idiot who went outside without proper gloves. Kate could do something for all of them, except the idiocy, which the soldier in question would have to deal with on his own. Now she was waiting, along with Giselle and Jim, for the new arrivals to their little enclave of septic smell and misery: word had reached them that the troop Jeanette was with had run into an automatic trap, just three kilometers from their base and was bringing two injured.

Jeanette wasn't among the injured. Kate knew that – had learned it seconds after learning about the incident. Wished she had learned it seconds before that.

She knew that none of the soldiers was in critical condition, but that didn't mean much. That had been an assessment given by a medical layman before the kilometer long track across a frozen plain. The troop hadn't gone far and was traveling without vehicle. The snow made transport by car impossible anyway. Those two soldiers would be hurting and very cold when they got here, on top of bleeding.

So they prepared for everything, with the three medics they had at hand right now and a handful of helpers from the current population of the base that Gina had collected for them. Those people weren't trained, but they helped bind wounds or give out medication every now and again and were picking up skills. Kate hoped that some of them would stick around to pick up some more, but most of them were soldiers who were laid up for health or other reasons and would leave as soon as they could, and some were former scavengers, many of whom were convinced that they were only stopping here shortly on the way to somewhere better, even if they had been here for years.

(Sometimes Kate wanted to grab those people and tell them to make up their minds _right now_ ; to either leave this moment, if they really wanted to, or accept that they wouldn't and become a fully contributing member of their fragile society. She never did, because she understood, and because that would have made her an asshole, but sometimes it was hard to reign in her frustration, because they were all _struggling_ here, and she needed people she could rely on.)

They were ready for anything when the soldiers arrived in the evening, about two hours after their official ETA. Kate was ready to go hug her daughter and check her over to see that she truly wasn't hurt as she would have done when Jeannie was six, but Jeannie was seventeen now and all business, keeping to the background helping with their equipment while three other soldiers delivered the injured ones to Kate and her team. So Kate only got a glimpse and a sense of loss and turned to her own work, which as always required all of her focus.

The soldiers in question weren't very badly hurt initially. One of them had suffered a broken arm and a nasty burn on the thigh, all the way down to the knee, the other one had a concussion and a burned and dislocated shoulder. All painful but it wouldn't have been so bad if they had been treated properly immediately. But they had only been patched up at a bare minimum and then everyone had pushed on, since walking with injuries was better than freezing do death in an icy wasteland. As a result, the two men were weak, shaky, and at least one of them – the one with the broken arm – showed signs of infection setting in from his burn.

Kate took care of them, not thinking about how that could have been Jeannie. How Jeannie's assignments were supposed to be harmless and safe and how things like that didn't exist in this world. She would think about that later.

The soldier with the concussion was called Ben. Kate remembered him well – he had been living in this base forever, one of the men stationed permanently as a watch guard. He was in his mid-twenties but looked older, a deep scar running from the bridge of his nose to the corner of his mouth only one of the deep lines time had carved into his face.

The other on, Parveen, she had never seen before. He was new, and young, barely older than Kyle. Kate thought he was probably a former scav who had joined them only recently and had been lucky enough to only be send on easy missions while getting used to life as a soldier. (Like Jeanette, except that in her case that had nothing to do with luck.)

Their latest mission had not been lucky, but it could have been much worse. While Kate took care of Ben and Giselle took care of Parveen, one of the soldiers who had brought them in and where now lingering nearby told the story of what had happened. Their small troop had been walking the parameters, just outside of the zone around the base that was generally deemed safe. On their way back, once the storm allowed it, they had come across a trap left there by the machines long ago and had completely missed it since it was covered in snow. Jeanette had nearly sat on it when they decided to take a short break in that area, but Parveen had become suspicious, having seen structures like that before but uncertain with the thick cover of snow obscuring everything.

His warning had saved Jeannie's life. His investigation of the structure had almost cost his own, when it went up in flames and threw him backwards. Ben had pulled him away and had gotten burned in the process, and then he'd lost his footing and fallen awkwardly onto a rock, nearly knocking himself out. He looked embarrassed at that account, It served, however, to remind everyone that the machines were the number one killer out there, but that didn't mean things like gravity had suddenly become harmless.

People could survive years of fighting out there and then come back and die of the most ridiculous reasons.

Ben had gotten off lightly. His concussion wasn't bad, but trekking across the snow rather than lying down hadn't done him any favors. Kate thanked both of them profoundly for protecting her daughter and the other members of their team and then forced them into the beds in the other room, insisting they both stayed at least one night where she could have an eye on them. Parveen, at least, would have to stay longer than that, until she was sure the antibiotics she was giving him for his infection were working, but she didn't tell him that yet. He would find out soon enough.

Both men protested enough as it was, although Ben, at least, accepted defeat willingly enough once he had settled on the bed that was soft by their standards, and had clean sheets, by their standards. He also seemed to enjoy the praise Kate gave him and Gina's open admiration, and Kate didn't fault him for it. Parveen seemed somewhat embarrassed by the fuss, but eventually gave in, half settling on the cot Gina had prepared for him. He seemed to be feeling a bit awkward – Ben was glad to by lying down, his head aching and his vision swimming, but Parveen insisted on feeling well enough as long as he didn't use his arm, and didn't seem to know what to do with himself in this bed when he was, according to his own assessment, in working condition.

“Don't act like you're okay when you're not,” Kyle told him from his spot on his own bed before Kate could override his protests and lecture him. She hadn't even noticed her other patient had been awake through all this. He didn't look particularly awake now; he looked pale and his voice was a weak hiss over sandpaper. But he seemed to have followed everything that was going on around him.

Parveen turned to look at him now, as if he was noticing his presence for the first time. He wasn't – Kate had seen his eyes lingering on the occupied bed for a second earlier before moving on, and had noticed him, like all the others who had invaded this room, skipping over that spot whenever they looked around, the way people did when they were concerned with the suffering of one person (or themselves) and didn't know what to do with other people also suffering in the vicinity. Since Kyle hadn't moved or spoken the entire time, they probably had thought like Kate that he was asleep, much to their presumed relief.

Now he had spoken and become a person, and Parveen, at least, had to acknowledge him. He did so by looking a little irritated. “I am feeling well,” he insisted. “They gave me painkillers, and I'll walk off the fever.”

“No,” Kyle rasped and closed his eyes, as if the thing was over for him with that. Then he opened them again and said with effort, “If you pretend and something happens, you won't be able to react as you have to. So don't pretend.”

“He's right,” Kate stepped in. “That's what gets people killed. You and others. Believe me, I have tried to patch together the results of that kind of bravado far too often. So take it from people who know.” At this she also glared at Kyle, who was just as eager to got out of here as Parveen was, hoping he would listen to his own advice.

“Hey,” Ben said from his own bed. “Aren't you the guy who saved Connor?” They had certainly heard about that, even out there. Word traveled fast, and John Conner nearly getting terminated was something that would have come up not only in connection to warnings about the terminators now looking a lot more human.

Ben continued to declare that that had been totally awesome, and Parveed looked a lot less irritated now. The look Kyle gave them in response was almost a glare. “That's any soldier's duty,” he told them, his weak voice barely reaching the other end of the room but still carrying the notion that they should drop it. Kate had already noticed before that he honestly didn't see his action as anything special, and didn't want others to treat it that way. (She had still thanked him for it once he'd been awake enough to take in her words, because it was something special to _her_.)

Now Kate calmed everyone down and told them to get some rest, and allow others to get rest. This was a medical facility, after all. And there were far too many people in here that didn't need to be here. It was time to get them all out.

Ben and Parveen had been accompanied by two people supporting Parveen and one supporting Ben. They had never left, and while they had been a welcome source of information, they were getting in the way now.

Although, they also proved distraction for Parveen that would be sorely missed by the young man. Maybe it truly was time to provide some reading material.

Just sitting around with nothing do to led to frustration, and too much time to think was not necessarily a good thing in a world where everyone's nightmares were based on memories. Kate understood that. She'd been wondering what to do about that for a while – Parveen and Ben wouldn't be here too long, if all went well, but others would come, and Kyle would be here for a while yet. Maybe those three could keep each other company for a bit. Kate rarely had time for that, nor did any of the others.

Lou could do it, when she was here. Kate had just decided to ask her to be here more often when the door opened and her other daughter came in.

Jeanette greeted her mother with a hug that her mother happily returned. Jeannie hadn't been particularly affectionate in a long time – even their hugs when she left on missions were mostly just a matter of form and habit. Now she seemed genuinely happy to see Kate, or maybe she was just genuinely happy to be back and not dead.

She looked well enough. A little more bony, perhaps, but unharmed and healthy. She'd cut off her hair so that it barely covered her ears. The vibrant red color made her skin look even paler, and the shadows under her eyes even darker, much like Kate's did.

But that was where the similarities ended. Kale looked at Jeanette now, the hair mostly hidden underneath a black head band, and saw a younger, thinner version of her own mother. (At least she thought her mother had looked like that. Early in Jeannie's life she had seen that she looked a lot like her and now her daughter's face was the one she remembered Mom by. Maybe she had changed into something different over time, and Mom's image had changed with her because memory was fickle and all photographs were lost.)

Jeannie's next stop was the other room, to check in on the comrades who had saved her and the others. Exactly what Kate had wanted no one to do for the next few hours, but Jeannie was alone and Kate didn't have the heart to turn her away. She might even just be the distraction they needed, provided her presence didn't disturb Kyle too much.

Her hopes were in vain. Jeanette chatted with Parveen a bit, who seemed happy about her presence and the distraction, and Kate was happy seeing her daughter together with people she fought with and relied on because it seemed that they really liked and respected her. Ben was mostly asleep, so they kept their voices down. All through the conversation, though, Jeannie kept an eye on Kyle, who was lying in a half-upright position against a bunch of pillows that Kate had stuffed there because it helped him breathe more easily and appeared to doze. As soon as he opened his eyes for a moment, Kate mumbled an apology to Parveen and went over to him, sat on the edge of his bed and took his hand in hers.

“Hey,” she said. “I am Jeanette. John Connor is my father. I know you saved him, and my little sister, and I also know you just did your job, but it means a damn lot to me, so thank you!” And then she leaned down and gave him as much of a hug as his position would allow, and Kyle had an almost comical mix of stoicism and panic reflected on his face. Kate wondered if he was even completely awake.

Jeannie leaned back after a second but kept hold him his hand. Kyle looked down at it as if unsure what to make of that. “General Connor is our leader,” he explained with his raspy voice. “And Louisa is a civilian. Any of us would have done the same, I just happened to be in the position for it.”

“True. But as you said, you happened to be the one who did it, and so you're the one who gets my gratitude. If it's any consolation, if it had been anyone else, I would be thanking _them_ now.”

Kyle nodded slowly, obviously unsure of what to say next. Jeanette, bless her, seemed to sense that and started chatting about how she'd only just come back from a mission and about the traps the machines had left for them in the wasteland. Small talk.

Or maybe there shouldn't be any blessing of her after all. Kate wished she would leave that boy alone so he could rest. But Kyle was fully awake now and he appeared very interested in Jeannie's story, asking questions about the trap, the mission, and the general situation outside. Kate, who had been about to step in, decided to let them go on until he fell asleep on his own.

It didn't take long in the end. Jeanette said goodbye to her friends briefly after and left, and Kate, who was relieved by  Giselle at the same time, left with her.  They talked while waiting near the school rooms where Lou was helping a group of six to eight years olds with their spelling. Afterward the three of them went to their rooms in the back of the base, for the first time in over a year together like that.

Jeanette wouldn't be able to stay the night. Even though she had a place here she decided to sleep in the dormitory with the rest of her troop. She did, however, have time to eat with her family, telling Lou all about her adventures out there in a manner that Kate hoped was blowing things out of proportion. Just before they were done with their plain but warm meal, the door opened and John came in with Casey.

Having both her daughters here at once hadn't happened in fourteen months. Having the entire family in one room was so rare that Kate nearly cried when she realized that she didn't know when that had happened for the last time. Casey had been really small then. Even now he was shy around his oldest sister, which reminded Kate that he barely even knew her.

Jeannie called him over and after a long moment of hesitation, he sat on her lab and let her tell him a downplayed version of her adventures. Casey looked impressed, but also sad. He probably saw straight through the parts where she acted like everything out there was harmless. He knew what the world was. Kate didn't know if he was sad because his sister was in danger all the time or because she thought she needed to lie to him about it. He said very little in response.

After John and Casey had also finished eating, Jeanette left to return to the dorm, and Louisa accompanied her. Kate could hear their voices trail off as they chatted, seeing them walk arm in arm. Casey watched them go as well, then turned to the other room without any kind of comment after they had turned around a corner and out of view. John closed the door to the outside and he and Kate were alone in their room for the first time in months.

They had two rooms in this base. The second one was tiny, used mostly for storage and  for the lockable cabinet they always had to have for things not meant for anyone's eyes. But Casey liked being there, even had build a little nest of blankets he slept in every now and again. The alternative was the two makeshift beds that took up half their main room that were a very tight fit for all of them at once.

They never slept in this room all at once.

When the girls were gone and Casey had closed the door to “his” room, Kate turned to John and he wrapped his arms around her as if he had been thinking the same things she was. “We have three children,” she said, resting her cheek on his shoulder. Trying to sound light. “Who would've thought.”

“ Certainly not them,” John said.

“You didn't tell me you lost communication with Jeannie's team for a while.”

“No, I didn't,” John agreed, and left it at that. Kate waited for the anger to come, but it didn't. Maybe it was tired, too.

“I fixed up the guys who saved her from getting set on fire today,” she told him instead. “They should be fine, if they take it easy for a while.”

“ Then make sure that they do.” John leaned back a little as if he wanted to say more, but didn't. Kate waited for him to pull away completely and tell her that he needed to go, that now the weather was allowing it there was so much to do. “What about Reese?” he asked.

“ Still alive,” Kate replied, in place of the sarcastic comment that was on her tongue in the face of John's persistent lack of interest so far. “He's getting stronger, but I wouldn't say he's out of the woods yet. One set back could easily kill him at this point. But I'm vaguely optimistic he'll live.”

“He'd better,” John said.

K ate nodded, stepping back. “We'll have a lot to explain if he dies.  _ I'll  _ have a lot to explain. If it turns out that I wasted all those precious resources on a dying man out of sentiment.”

“I told you to save him,” John pointed out.

“After I had already done so. I don't think Jim told anyone about it, though, and that's good. You better keep out of that. It'll be b a d enough if the people lose their trust in  _ me _ .”

“I can't imagine it's that bad,” John replied, talking like a grown up to a child who was blowing a misstep out of proportion.

“It's exactly that bad!” Kate snapped. “People are talking. The attitude of my team has changed. If word spreads I will lose the respect of the people here, and their respect is all we have to make them follow us. So you damn well better keep your distance from this decision.”

“I haven't heard anyone talk.” John said it off-handedly, in what was probably an attempt to be reassuring but only showed how little he noticed outside of military operations.

“How can you not? You've been here for weeks!” Kate tried to keep her voice down; she didn't want Casey to hear them. She tried not to be frustrated and scared, but she had been for weeks. “I made a mistake,” she admitted.

“A mistake?”

“Yeah. I shouldn't have saved him. It was the wrong thing to do, all things considered. It would have been just as wrong to let him die after what he's done, but that would be a wrong that at least wasn't unfair to everyone else.”

She had never said that. She hadn't even thought it. But the sentiment had always been there at the back of her mind. And she hated it.

“No.” John's voice was unexpectedly hard. All these years he had always insisted that they could be nothing special, that they couldn't have any privileges beyond those they needed to do their jobs, and now he stared at her as if even the suggestion of treating this case, of him and their daughter getting saved, no different than anyone else getting saved, was a personal betrayal.

“No,” he said again. “You did the right thing, and you will continue to do it.”

That sounded a lot like an order – something he never gave her. Kate stared at him. John stared back.

“What, you think after everything already went wrong, I'm going to let him die now?” It wasn't what she wanted to say. “Don't worry, That would only make everything worse.”

“Good.”

“Doesn't mean he won't die anyway.”

John opened his mouth to reply, then closed it. He took her shoulders and placed a kiss on her forehead and his voice was suddenly very calm again. “Just do your best, okay? He deserves to live.”

Kate sighed, wondering what she was missing. “Who doesn't?”

  


-

  


Things that had come to nearly a standstill picked up again. Missions were continued or finally started, supply runs were made. In three days John would lead a mission into the heart of L.A. to see if anything significant had happened on the side of the machines while the army had had to lay low. There was much to do before that, but they couldn't delay for the sake of preparation. It was late October. The weather wouldn't get any better from now on.

There was one thing that John wanted to do before he left, though, which meant he had to do it now, before he was too preoccupied with other things to find the time for it. It wasn't like it would take long. It just interrupted the flow of things, and right now the flow of things was leading outside into the cold snow.

So John got it done the day after Jeannie had gotten back. She wouldn't head out for another week at least, and her injured comrades would be stuck here for longer than that, even if they got to leave Kate's clinic. At the moment they were both still laid up there, and that was very convenient, since they were who John wanted to see.

He left early in the evening, just after getting out of bed. Despite the break he felt he had gotten through the storm, he had been so tired he'd slept right through Kate getting up and leaving. She'd let him sleep. John was vaguely annoyed, but mostly grateful. He would be on a mission soon that would offer neither warmth not comfort, and the fact that he had been able to overcome the instinct to roll over and linger in bed longer than he should since before the war didn't mean the instinct had been eradicated.

Surprisingly, Lou was gone, too. It wasn't surprising that she would be up before him, as she was an early riser and had less rest to catch up on, but John hadn't thought she would be able to sneak out without him noticing. For all that Jeanette was the louder of his daughters, Lou was the one who couldn't seem to walk through a quiet room without bumping into the table or closing the door just a little too forcefully.

Or maybe she learned to be more careful now. John remembered the child she had been, and she wasn't a child anymore.

She was thirteen.

He sighed as he dressed into the same clothes he had worn the day before. When he had been thirteen, he'd been trying to lead an army. And found that armies didn't want to be led by thirteen-year-olds. That hadn't changed much, he supposed, though the army was much more open than it had been about letting thirteen-year-olds play with them.

That wouldn't always be so, John reminded himself. They just needed to get through another three years. And he needed to get through the next fifteen minutes.

Five of them were spend walking to the clinic. No one stopped him with any question or concern; the only two soldiers he came across merely greeted him and went on with their business, which was walking somewhere else. Once he got to his destination, John waited three more minutes outside while Kate finished with a patient, not wanting to intrude.

The patient was a little girl, no older than five. She sat on the examination table, patiently allowing Kate to perform some checks, take her temperature, draw some blood. She was thin and the gray pallor his her skin seemed to indicate that whatever was wrong with her had been wrong for some time. A teenage boy, presumably her brother, waited nearby, watching. He looked sad.

Kate gave them a handful of pills and a few words that John couldn't understand from his spot outside the room and watched them leave. She looked sad, too, but only until John came on. Then she didn't look like anything.

“You can go right through,” she offered, knowing why he was here. “Everyone's awake in there.”

Sure enough, everyone was. John nodded his greeting to Lou, who was perched on the edge of Reese's bed, talking quietly to the man who had saved her life. Corporal Rengith was just putting on a loose fitting pair of pants, allowing John to catch a glimpse of the bandages around his thigh. He looked surprised to see John here, and then mortified at having literally been caught with his pants down. John decided to have mercy and turned to Sergeant Miller first, who was currently having his head wound re-bandaged by the young girl who had been working with Kate for a few weeks now and whose name always insisted on slipping from John's memory.

He'd come to thank those men for their bravery out in the field – as a commander who showed appreciation for their efforts, but also as a father whose daughter wasn't dead because of them. While Miller beamed with slightly dizzy pride and was obviously delighted by the visit, Rengith blushed and mumbled something about it having been nothing.

John was serious about his words; it wasn't just an empty gesture, and he hoped these men wouldn't see it that way. Still, he didn't have a lot of time. A troop would leave in an hour that he wanted to brief before they left, having rather specific orders for them.

Also, Perry and his group would be back the next morning, and John was eager to hear their report. He and Hernandez would plan their own upcoming mission based on it. And there were many things he needed to take care of before.

So he left after only five minutes or so. Kate looked a little put off as he walked past her, but she really shouldn't have expected more. She was living this life, too.

Therefore she couldn't possibly be surprised that she didn't get a chance to comment on it. John was in his command center ten minutes later, brooding over a map, notes on reports spread all around him. He was very focused. He didn't think about the time in medical at all.

A troop send out just after the worst of the storm was over to check the power lines of the transmitters came back with nothing interesting to report but a case of frostbite. John allowed himself a moment to be frustrated with careless soldiers. Another troop came back prematurely after they found two dead bodies in the snow not far from their base.

They didn't know these people. The two women were carrying weapons and explosives, but for all anyone could tell they were not part of the army. Possibly they were scavs on a supply run, who had gotten lost and ended up here, far from anything interesting. Or they had been looking for the base to join the army, hadn't found it, and hadn't been spotted by any of the patrols due to the weather. Chances were they had frozen to death. There had been no wounds visible at a casual glance, but the corpses where frozen solid and had to handle, and the troop's leader had decided to bring them back to base for closer inspection. The ice field was no place for that.

It meant work for Kate, and that meant the rooms of John's family that also functioned as an office for him were a good place to do some work. People had approached him with various problems all day, and John needed some time to focus on reports and planning. He was contemplating a mission back to Arizona where the machines had taken territory previously controlled by a branch of the army, now all gone. Planning that would take time, but the more time they needed the harder it would get.

Perhaps they should give that area up and focus on L.A. entirely. Only three more years and Skynet's fall would rid them of all the machines and their oppression.

There were people in that area _now_.

John sighed and rubbed his forehead. It was the same dilemma he had faced over and over and over again through his life. And he would need the help and advice of others to make a decision here. But for the moment, he needed half an hour to think about it by himself without anyone coming to him with something else. If he was here, in his private rooms, they would only bother him if they really needed to.

He was well prepared for a few hours by himself but got only one. It was not an emergency that forced other people on him. It was Kate coming in. John looked up, surprised to see her back here already, and Kate looked at him like she had known perfectly well that she would find him here.

“You're busy,” she observed. She had come here for him. It was not an emergency. If he told her this was urgent, she would leave him alone.

“Going nowhere,” he admitted. “I'm lacking information to make a final decision on this matter, and to be honest I don't want to make it.” He sighed. “Once this is over, I won't decide on anything ever again. Not even the color of my socks.”

Kate refused to crack a smile. “Availability will decide that for you,” she pointed out. “Even after the war. Whenever that may be.”

The last bit was fishing for information she very obviously suspected he had. “Did you get a look at the dead women?” John asked.

“Yes. They're dead.”

Now it was John who looked irritated. “No shit.”

“I don't know what killed them yet. Freezing is the most likely explanation. One was wounded – it was a few days old, bandaged, but it probably slowed her down to the point where she couldn't move quickly enough to escape the cold. As for the other one, she might just not have wanted to leave her, froze as well.”

A small tragedy among many. John felt sad for those women who had gotten so close to their base, but what mattered now was that they hadn't been gunned down by machines who had also made it close to their base.

“Find out for sure.”

“I will.” Kate came closer, leaned against the edge of the desk, crossed her arms. John looked back at her and actively didn't try to guess what she wanted. “It was very decent of you to come and thank Rengith and Miller in person. They did, after all, save the life of our daughter. And it made them happy to know you appreciate that. Good for morale.”

“That's not why I did it.” He didn't say that it was the obvious thing to do when someone saved your child, sensing a trap.

“No. You did it because that's what anyone would have done if someone got hurt saving their child.”

John resisted the urge to close his eyes, or else run from the room faking an emergency. There was no escaping.

“It means a lot to the child in question, too, by the way, to know their elusive parents care if they live or die,” Kate continued. “You can't have missed that Lou was present when you talked to those two. And you better believe that she didn't miss how you thanked them for saving her sister but never bothered to so much as look at the guy who might die for saving  _ her _ .”

“ Lou knows that's got nothing-” John stopped. “There wasn't time. She knows I love her no less, and that I  _ am _ more grateful than I could possibly express.”

“Does she? John, she's thirteen!”

“What does that even mean in this world?”

“It means she notices it when the father she rarely ever sees anyway seems to care a lot about her sister and not at all about her. She's not stupid and she's not blind, but you're asking too much if you expect her to take your love for granted without any proof.”

“Did she says so?”

“You know that she wouldn't.”

“Yeah. And I know that she knows better. Me caring less for her than for Jeannie isn't the problem.”

“No,” Kate agreed. “It's not. But it's obvious that there is some kind of problem, so why don't you go and explain to your daughter why you have such issues with some guy you don't even know that you can't bring yourself to thank him for saving both of your lives?”

“I don't have issues with him. The opportunity just hasn't come up yet. In case you haven't noticed, he hasn't actually been awake much when I was around.”

“I'm surprised _you_ have noticed that, since you never actually bothered to check.”

“I didn't want to disturb him.”

“Bullshit. That didn't stop you this morning, did it? Now, I've gotten to know that kid a little bit in the last weeks, and while he's not at his best right now, I can promise you that whatever you have heard about him that made you stay aw-”

“I have heard nothing,” John interrupted her. This was getting ridiculous. He should just have gone there and said Thank you days ago. How hard could that be? “I know nothing about him but that he's a good soldier, and that he saved Lou's life, and mine.”

“Is that the issue?” Kate asked. “That he saved you?”

John stared at her, not sure where this was going. “Do you think I _wanted_ to die?”

“No,” Kate replied, the hard edge gone from her voice for the moment. “I don't. I think maybe, especially with the situation we got here, you think that by acknowledging what he did for _you_ , you'd make it look like you value your own life more than that of other people, since you don't personally thank _every_ soldier who'd ever made a sacrifice for anyone else.”

“That's,,, no.” John shook his head. He shouldn't be surprised that in the absence of information, his wife – and probably everyone else – was trying to come up with explanations of her own. But this was getting out of hand. “I may not thank them, but the ones they saved usually do. I am, actually, aware of that. No. This is just a case of bad timing. I'll go see him tomorrow. Hopefully it'll be a little calmer then, and I get to speak some words with him in private.” He hoped he sounded genuine, and not like that idea filled him with horror.

Kate didn't look convinced. That could have any number of reasons that didn't have to do with John's face, or his voice. She stepped closer and put a hand on his shoulder; a peace offering. “Don't make too much of a secret out of it,” she said. Then she turned around and left.

John turned back to his work, but found himself suddenly unable to pretend it was important. It _was_ , but all these were problems he couldn't solve on his own, here, in this little room hiding from everyone. There were a damn lot of problems he couldn't solve. But there were some he had to face none the less.

He's talk to Reese tomorrow. Or the day after. No, tomorrow. Get it over it. What was there to it? It wasn't like things would go any different whether or not John acknowledged the man's existence. Might as well leave a less terrible impression while everything followed its inevitable course. Keep his daughter from questioning him, his wife from wondering. Possibly keep Reese from thinking his General was an ungrateful asshole. John sighed. He should have done this much sooner. While Reese was still mostly out of it, possibly. Like a fucking hero.

 

 


	27. 2026 - 4/4

In the end he did not go the next day after all, but the day after. Something had come up. Something always came up. In this case it had been another failure of their communication lines. John needed to have that taken care of, then find out what had happened to all the teams outside during the hours HQ had been cut off from communications. In one case almost an entire team had been wiped out by a terminator hiding in a group of scavengers. One of the survivors then snapped and thought that everyone else was secretly a machine. He managed to kill two more before someone shot him. The mood in the communications center was grim.

John's own mission was delayed by another day.

He didn't have a lot of time when he finally excused himself and made his way to medical, and that suited him just fine. An excuse to keep this short. And that was silly, and idiotic, and stupid, he knew. It was late in the year 2026. Sometime in 2027, Reese would transfer to John's own unit, and then John could hardly keep avoiding him.

Six years ago, he had planned to adopt the kid. Now he could hardly even face him. _What am I doing?_ John thought as he entered Kate's examination room. _What am I going to do?_

Could time still be changed? He had never tried, for fear of breaking something that couldn't be fixed. He wouldn't try it now.

Kate wasn't in. Giselle was, but, not having any patients to treat at the moment, she was standing in the door to the back room, listening to the conversation going on in there. Apparently there were quite a few people involved in it. John grimaced before he stepped out of the corridor and into the light of the treatment room. So much for his plan to catch Reese alone.

A part of him was relieved.

Giselle noticed him when he was standing just behind her. Her eyes widened in surprised, but he gestured for her to keep quiet. He'd rather announce his presence on this own terms.

There were not just other people present, there were surprisingly many people present. From his place behind Giselle, John could see that Ben Miller was no longer here, and the bed he had been in was now occupied by Parveen Rengith, who looked well enough if slightly feverish. (He remembered Kate saying something about an infection.) The young man was sitting on the bed, leaning against the wall, and on the edge of the bed two other people were seated. One was Captain Miranda Jones, from Perry's troop, recently returned from their latest trip. She was obviously here for Reese. On a chair between the beds was a young man John recognized as Corporal Sommer from fleeting meetings – also a member of Perry's team. Justin Perry himself was half-sitting on the edge of Reese's bed. The last visitor was Estelle Marini, and that was a surprise indeed. Estelle belonged to John's own unit, and as far as he knew had no reason to visit either Reese or Rengith.

But here she was, emerged in conversation with all the others. Despite not having a lot of time on his hand, John found himself keeping to the back, not wanting to interrupt. He already found himself thinking about turning around and coming back later but let that thought go. If he didn't do this now, he never would. Probably.

Then he caught up with the conversation that was going on in there and his stomach clenched.

“Well, you got no idea what you're talking about, so shut up,” Sommer was just now interrupting Rengith in the middle of whatever he was saying. “It's easy to judge things from this side of the fence.”

“All I'm saying is that you should be grateful the machines left you alive,” Rengith defended himself. “Children aren't strong or durable and they could easily have killed you like any other weak worker.”

“Grateful, yeah,” Sommer spat. “Because not killing us was a fucking act of charity.”

John wondered now if he should interrupt after all, but Justin spoke up before he could.

“I think what Parv wanted to say is that it's a good thing that the machines found young children to be useful for something. Else we would have to make do without some rather valuable soldiers now.”

That was very diplomatically worded. John still felt himself tense up more and more, seeing no way this conversation could not go downhill from here.

“I had always wondered about that,” a new voice sounded from further in the room, telling John that he had missed someone from where he was standing. It was a male voice, and he thought it belonged to one of the civilians who sometimes helped out at the clinic, but he couldn't put a name to it. “It does seems rather unlikely that the machines would be so harsh in sorting out people who have a cold but leave children alive who are too small and weak to work as hard.”

John has spend a lot of years _not_ wondering about that. He had never asked Kate about it, or anyone else. He acknowledged now that he didn't want to know.

“We wondered about that, too, in the beginning,” Perry replied. “It just didn't seem to make sense. But with everything we've learned after liberating the first camps, it seems like the machines were following a very simple logic. Humans are fallible, not just following instructions like robots but prone to emotions and... urges. If you stuff a lot of humans into one confined space and make them miserable, they are going to get aggressive. They are going to turn on each other, for gaining an advantage over others or simply to vent frustration, or to exercise power when they have none.”

“Okay, I get that,” the guy in the back answered. “But that doesn't make any frigging sense. Why keep kids in there when they would be killed first anyway?”

“Because of that, exactly,” Reese explained. Hearing his voice, even raspy and weak, came as a shock, like a punch. The last time John had heard him speak, he had had the high voice of a child, unrecognizable as the same voice John had heard on that old, old recording so long ago. Now he sounded just like the man on the tape, talking about time travel with barely contained frustration. “If a child got hurt or killed, that wasn't much of a loss to the machines. And the angry men would turn to them first, because they couldn't fight back well. So there was not such a high risk of the attacker getting hurt as well and then having to be sorted out. If a grown person attacked another grown person, they could injure them in defense. Everyone knew that. Children where a safe target.”

“The men could attack women, though, right? I mean, I guess rape was a problem? I suppose the bots didn't care about that. So wouldn't the men go for the female prisoners first? Women are weaker then men.”

“On the average,” Miranda Jones quipped in. “But a grown woman can still fuck you up pretty badly if you're about to kill her, even if you win in the end. And then the machines kill you. So you pick an easier target.”

“There's also the thing that women were executed for getting pregnant,” Sommer mentioned. He sounded bitter and angry underneath the casual tone, a stark contrast to Reese, who had sounded like he was merely giving an explanation on something that was in no way traumatizing or horrible. “So they can't win. It's not like they can hold still and hope not to get hurt so they won't be killed, because they'll be killed anyway. So they are going to fight for their lives every time. Makes them bad prey. So Skynet thought it would throw in some kids as distraction. Also, they don't get pregnant, so unless you fight back and get hurt, you're reusable. So you see, it's all robot logic.”

“Just sucks if you're a girl hitting puberty,” Jones mentioned, her voice overly casual. “Very few of those actually made it to adulthood.”

John saw a chance to interrupt that conversation and let it go, not trusting his voice at the moment. He dared a look at Reese, but the young soldier was just looking at the blanket covering his legs with an unreadable expression, as if lost in thought.

John hadn't known about all this. He hadn't wanted to know about all this. There had been enough of an idea to never ask, but even as it didn't surprise him, it still made him feel queasy.

He should go. This was not a good moment for any kind of semi-official visit.

“I think I'm going to throw up,” the guy whose name he didn't know said. “What about... There must have been better people in there. Marini, you've been in a camp, right? I can't imagine everyone just let that happen.”

Estelle didn't say anything for a long moment. “Yes, we did,” she finally replied. “Things were different there. Here, you have friends and comrades who have your back and a chance to fight back. There you're all alone, and your life is literally all you have. So when some asshole who's stronger than you goes after someone else, you're just glad it's not you.”

“Glad it made _someone_ happy, then,” Sommer spat.

“It didn't make me happy,” Estelle said back, only a little harsher than before. “It didn't make anyone happy. But what could we have done, except get ourselves killed?”

“I don't know? How about _anything_? It's people like you who ensured that things happened in the first place. I bet us kids were fucking convenient for you, huh?”

“That's enough,” Reese said. Sommer glared in his direction but ultimately ignored him when Estelle spoke again.

“I'm not defending myself, or any of the others. Yeah, we did look away and pretend we didn't see anything, because we all just wanted to live. And we're all terrible people. All I ask is that you remember that _everyone_ is a terrible person in there. Just tell me, how many of the other kids did _you_ try to help when it was someone else's turn?”

“Oh, sorry, I didn't know you missed the part where I was busy not getting raped or murdered every night.”

“Just like me, you mean,” Estelle retorted. She was still calm but John, who knew her well, could tell from her voice that she was upset. “What, you think your live was worth more than mine because you were younger?”

“Fuck, yeah! You were older. Stronger. More experienced and all that shit. And yet all you guys did with all that experience was let terrible things happen to those who couldn't fight back. And then you get out and you have the nerve to join the fucking army and parade around with fucking Connor himself as if you're some kind of hero who deserves resp–”

“That's enough, Corporal,” Reese repeated. His voice was calm but the underlying hardness made it an order.

Sommer shot him a look, like a defiant kid. “She's–”

“She's your superior officer, who wouldn't be in that position if she didn't deserve it, and you are out of line.”

Sommer opened his mouth as if to say more, then closed it and looked away, still angry but obviously unwilling to fight with Reese as well.

“General,” Reese than said, when he looked up and saw John standing behind Giselle. He sounded startled, as if he had only just noticed him, and that was obviously the case. Everyone else now turned and stared at John, and John would have liked to simply not be there anymore.

“Don't mind me, Soldier,” he said, his voice all business because that was a voice he could always trust. “I had come here looking for Kate.” The lie slipped from his lips before he even thought about giving it. This was not the moment to do what he _had_ come for. If Reese's face fell, he didn't see it. (He wasn't looking.)

“She's not here,” Giselle told him. He could tell she didn't believe him. Could he? Maybe he felt that way because he _was_ lying to her and thought it should show on his face.

“I figured. I didn't mean to interrupt your conversation.” He found himself looking at Justin, who was the highest ranking officer in this group and _should_ have interrupted that conversation before it got out of hand. Before Reese, of all people, had to do that. Sometimes John feared nothing more than that there _was_ an afterlife, because if there was, his mother would be waiting from him and he had no excuses. “I'll come back later,” he finished lamely, hoping that no one but Giselle was aware that he had been in this room for more than a few seconds.

There was work to do. He had never meant to stay long anyway, and where originally the issues he had to take care of had been a welcome excuse to keep things short, they now where a welcome distraction. Except he couldn't keep from thinking about what he had heard, and even when he was not thinking about it he was conscious of the cold tension in his stomach.

He wanted to talk to Kate, he realized. He wanted to talk to anyone, and hope that sharing his feelings would ease them. But how would that look – what would _she_ feel when he came to her with something he had let her, in blissful ignorance, carry alone for so many years?

They would leave tomorrow. Tomorrow night, almost twenty-four hours from now. Suddenly that couldn't come fast enough. At least it would give him something to do and time to work through some things.

But then, what did he need to work through? Things were very clear. He was John Connor. He was supposed to save all of mankind, and here, almost thirty years in, he had to accept that he didn't even know how _bad_ things were.

Right now, all this kept his focus off things he needed to focus on, and it ended with him sitting in the washroom, feeling like a total failure.

It was his job to lead, he tried to console himself. He had done that. He was still doing it. There were certain things that he didn't need to know for that, for they were in the past and no level of leadership would ever be able to change anything about them. Worse, they distracted him from doing what he needed to do, so it was good he had been able to not see them until now, right?

It was a good argument. He was quite impressed with himself. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite enough to convince himself. (It wouldn't, he was certain, convince his mother.)

John stayed in the washroom for a long time – longer than he had to. It was empty at this time. He went through the trouble of heating up water, had a long, moderately hot bath, and knew it would be the last time he would feel anything like warm and clean for weeks. He should enjoy it. But it was just an excuse to retreat from everyone and be left alone.

The washrooms were anything but private – they couldn't be, in an environment like this. But somehow people still thought that it was in bad taste to bother their General with anything while he was naked in a brass tub, and for all that John didn't want them to treat him differently from anyone else, this was something he had never scolded them for. He certainly wasn't going to start now.

But eventually he had to leave. And he did not go to his family's rooms and the privacy they offered. He went to the command center, where everyone was busy speaking into microphones to far off counter parts, or bending over maps, or sleeping on cots in the corner. John passed all that until he was in the office at the end of it, the one where he could work somewhat undisturbed while still being available to everyone. It was empty. It wasn't always. Sometimes, in his absence, Hernandez used it, or other members of the brass. The drawers in the metal desk could be locked but several people had a key. This room didn't go to waste when John wasn't here.

The desk was in the back of the room, centered before the wall, so he could work without anyone rummaging behind him. This was the only place in the command center where that was possible, and it was popular for this. John attributed the fact that none the less the office wasn't in use right now to his prolonged presence at the bunker: even though this place was open to more than one person, they still thought of it as _his_ office. Even though he hadn't been in here in days.

Perhaps they simply worried that if this place was taken, he would retreat to his private room again and be out of reach for anything that was not an emergency.

This was perfect, John thought with a hint of bitterness. Close enough not to be cut off from everything, to work of things he should work on and be available and immediately informed about new developments, and yet closed off enough that most people would leave him alone to do exactly none of those things. Perhaps he should go out there and find some disaster. He knew himself well enough to know that unless he found something else to focus on, his thoughts would be stuck where they were, and there they were no good for anyone.

The walls of the office were lined with cabinets and book shelves. There were smaller tables strewn with papers. The door had been lockable, but it had fallen apart a year ago due to some freak accident in John's absence that no one liked to talk about when he was around and they had never replaced it. The command room it led to was always filled with people anyway – no one unauthorized could get in here without being seen.

Had anyone even seen John go in here? He looked at the doorway and saw nothing but the opposite wall and the corner of the awkwardly shaped room that was the center of their society.

No one ever came this way by accident. There was no door to this room, but only those came who had a reason to come.

So when Estelle Marini appeared shortly after she probably had a reason to be here. She probably had seen John come here. She was probably here for a reason.

“Do you have a moment, Sir?” she asked, the formal address telling him this was business.

John looked at her and tried not to remember how Corporal Sommer had talked to her. Reese had been right. She was his superior officer even if they weren't on the same unit, and had proven herself over and over. He was still angry at Justin for not interfering and wondered if he had even addressed the issue after John was gone, or if he had simply let it go.

He would have made some suggestions in that direction but wasn't sure he wanted anyone to know he had been there to hear all that.

“I do,” he said. He had only just sat down here and started to shuffle through some papers on the desk – not so much working as figuring out what the last person to sit here had been working on. “What is it?”

“I meant to talk to you about what happened in medical earlier today. I don't know how much you heard of our conversation...?” She trailed off, making it a question. John contemplated lying, but that wasn't him, and it wasn't useful.

“I heard enough,” he said.

“I'm afraid you didn't. The discussion went on some after you were gone, although it now mostly focused on insubordination and how not to behave in the army.”

“Oh, good.” John nodded. At least that had been taken care of. “Sommer was out of line.”

“He was. But he was also not wrong.”

“It doesn't matter. For all I hear about him, he is difficult to deal with on the best of days. You served with him – you should know. Out there everyone has to be able to rely on the other. We can't have soldiers neglect their duties towards their comrades because of resentments for things they had no influence on.”

“Don't worry about that. Sommer doesn't hate me. He hates _everyone_ ,” Marini said, as if that would make it better. “Most people, anyway,” she amended.

“Exactly. You do see how that is a problem, right? I do understand the circumstances that made him this way,” he softened his argument. “But that doesn't change anything about what he is like and how it's affecting his environment.”

“So, you're going to kick him out of the army because of this?”

“Is that why you came here?”

“Partially. He's apologized, but I know he doesn't actually see how he did anything wrong there. Reese told him to pull himself together, though, and that made him think.”

“He listens to Reese?”

“More than to anyone else. It's got something to do with Reese coming from similar circumstances, so his opinion actually counts for Sommer. Anyway, I wanted to ask you not to be too strict with him. Don't kick him out over this. He's not going to let us down when it counts. And I can take a few harsh words, especially when they are deserved.”

John thought about this. He hadn't really considered removing Sommer from the army, since his commanding officer had never indicated considering it either. He knew the guy was a bit of a loose cannon, though, and he knew that because he had kept an eye on him from the distance. Few people who grew up in an extermination camp made it in the long run, and now John had an even better idea as to why.

He also wondered, now, what kind of people they _did_ allow to serve in the army. There was no background check on anyone who wanted to enlist. Being willing to risk their lives to destroy killer bots and not being a danger to their comrades was usually enough to qualify. Not only was there no way to check up on the history of basically anyone, there also was their desperate need for fighting men and women to take into account. They couldn't afford to turn down anyone who wanted to join them unless they were seriously unstable, and so no questions where ever asked.

How many of their soldiers were rapists or murderers? How could they possibly tell? If anyone purposefully harmed a fellow human being here in the bases or out on the field there were consequences, down to exile, which in certain areas could easily lead to death. Executions happened in especially extreme cases. They had no prisons and some people were too dangerous to be allowed free anywhere near potential victims. John didn't like it and always made sure the culprits were guilty without a doubt, but it was all they could do under these circumstances. Fortunately, it didn't happen a lot.

But how much had already happened before those people came here? How much had they gotten away with, and would continue to get away with?

“I think you're not the problem. I don't know what it's like in there in the long run, not really, so I can hardly judge you for doing all you could to stay alive.”

“I heard you voluntarily let yourself be stuffed in a camp once.” There was both question and admiration in her voice. John nearly snorted. Surely she had heard about that. People liked to tell that story. What they never took into consideration was how much of a walk in the park that had been, compared to what many of the former inmates had been through.

“The very first one we freed,” he confirmed. “Back in Santa Fe. It was only for a few days, though. Not enough to get more than a fleeting idea of how bad it could be.”

“But you've seen people die there. A lot.” That wasn't even a question. Even if it had been only a few days, she knew there would have been plenty of victims. Just arriving at the place in a truck that wasn't empty guaranteed that.

“There was a woman who arrived with us,” John recalled. “Her name was Ginny. She told me just before the machines took her away to get executed along with most of the others who had been on our transport. I think she just wanted for someone to remember her.” John didn't remember her often, only at times like this, when current issues dragged up the memory. She was one of far too many now. She had already been that when he met her.

“Did she know who you were, Sir?”

“No. We couldn't let anyone know, obviously, as that would have blown it.” He looked her in the eyes, focusing on the here and now. “Hernandez and I did nothing for those people we met on the transport, nor for anyone else taken out before the mission went down. There was a boy who arrived with us who was barely a teenager, and we let him get killed.”

“At least you had a higher goal than just saving your own skin.”

But saving his own skin had been very important for that higher goal.

“Who knows how I would have acted otherwise, knowing that there was nothing fighting for them would have actually accomplished except getting us killed, too.” John would like he think he would have tried, but in this case he probably wouldn't. What about cases like the ones Sommer had described? Would he have interfered, knowing children – or anyone, really – were about to be raped or murdered or both? Yes, he thought. He would have. Even if it would have gotten him killed, too, and saved no one. He would not have been able to stand by and just let it happen.

At least the person he was now, after a life as a military leader wouldn't. How he would have acted after a life in the ruins with nothing but pure survival instincts to go by and nothing to call his own but his life and the will to keep it, he could only speculate.

There was enough doubt, in any case, not to judge Estelle too harshly. He tried not to, anyway. He was trying not to think too much about it. Maybe he would at some point.

“Everyone in there was just trying to survive,” he realized at the same time. “I heard what you said to Sommer, and it's true. I can hardly judge you for simply being human.”

She looked thoughtful. He thought she looked thoughtful. Maybe she didn't.

“When I had only just been in the camp for a short time,” she said, “when I was still kind of in denial about being there and sort of waited for the gates to magically explode so we could all run away, there was a new delivery, and one guy tried to escape. He was actually pretty good. I didn't see the whole thing but someone told me later that he disabled a machine with his bare hands just running past it. But he got gunned down anyway. And then he was lying in the snow, slowly dying, and no one tried to do anything about it. I remember thinking how easy it would be to put him out of his misery, but I didn't do it. I didn't even think that the machines would kill me for it. I mean, there was that fear, but mostly, I just couldn't bring myself to care enough. I think what I really thought was that _someone else_ should do something about it.”

John looked at her, not entirely sure why she told him that. It seemed that the conversation earlier had brought up some memories that she just wanted to share. And apparently she wanted his judgment on it.

“The thing is, someone did in the end,” she finally continued. “And it was some kid who couldn't have been older than nine or ten.”

“Probably got something out of that,” John pointed out. Estelle shook her head.

“I don't think so. I saw the whole thing, it was...” She trailed off. “Anyway,” she said. “I'm trying to be better than I was, and I know I am not alone with the failures of my past.”

“You're aware of them, though, and that's more than I can say of many others,” John said before she could go on. “My mother used to say that recognizing and accepting your weaknesses is the first step to overcoming them. It's easy to just hand out blame to others.” Although she could have handed all the blame out to the machines and would have been right to do so.

Still, people like Sommer were stuck in their past and as long as he didn't even try to adjust, he remained a problem.

“Okay. I get that,” Estelle said. “But I also know it's easier for me. I was already grown up when I ended up there. Sommer grew up _there_. It shaped everything about how he sees the world. I know it's a problem, but you need to understand that it's almost impossible to shake that off. He's been with Perry for years, and while it's not always easy, he hasn't really broken anything yet that cannot be fixed. Altogether, he's doing better than most who share his history.”

John did understand that. But he also feared that constantly letting the guy get away with his behavior just made it worse in the long run. He needed to control himself, for his own sake as well as his comrades'.

“Reese shares his history,” he couldn't keep himself from pointing out. “And he seems to have himself under control quite well.”

“Reese is a gift,” Estelle replied matter-of-factly. “I'm not saying he doesn't have issues, but he's got a hold on them, you're right. Do you know why?” She looked at him in a way that told him she didn't really care if he knew why or wanted to know. “Because all he wants is to serve in this army – to serve you, Sir – and be the best, most useful fucking soldier he can be before something kills him. Which is kind of sad if you ask me. But what's even sadder is that that doesn't seem good enough.”

John narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?” he asked, although he did know what she meant. He wondered, suddenly, if this whole conversation about Sommer had been one big, elaborate trap.

“Well, if you'll let me speak openly, Sir?” What a time be get formal. John through she'd been pretty open already, but he nodded anyway.

“I know it's probably not your intention, but it seems like you're avoiding him,” she continued. “I noticed that, even though I haven't been around much. Miranda – Captain Jones, that is, has noticed, and General Perry, and everyone else. Reese too, of course. He didn't say anything, but I can tell that he thinks he's failed or disappointed you in some way. And I don't know if he has, but if he did–”

“He didn't do anything wrong,” John interrupted her before she could say any more. How did this thing turn out this way? Why couldn't he just have gone there two weeks ago to talk to his future father like with any other human being? “I just haven't had the chance yet. In fact, I had come earlier to thank him in person, but then it seemed like a bad time so I postponed it, if you absolutely have to know. And everyone needs to mind their own business more. There are much worse things to worry about out there, don't you think?”

That was pretty harsh. John usually tried not to be an asshole to the men and women who came to him with more or less personal matters, even when he was busy and his head was filled with other things, which was basically all the time. But he didn't like it when people thought that just because he was a somewhat public figure they had some kind of say in what he did in this private life.

Estelle's expression didn't change much. It merely became more neutral. She had survived years in an extermination camp and had nightmares about unspeakable horrors almost every night. John didn't have the power to actually hurt her with this. But she though the world of him, he knew that - thought he was some kind of savior, and so she thought the world of his opinion.

He was also able to appreciate that she was acting out of concern for Reese, whom she obviously cared about. John appreciated that, but he appreciated it somewhere in the back of his mind while on the surface he was irritated at Estelle and angry at himself for letting things drag long past the point where it looked like he did anything out of his own volition and not because everyone else was pressuring him into it.

Estelle nodded once, then excused herself and left. She had said her piece, and for all she knew John had refused to hear it. He now regretted not being in his private rooms where he could bang his head against the wall without anyone wondering if he'd snapped.

He didn't want to think about this anymore. He wanted, he realized, to never think about it again. He wanted to get on with his life and never again have to deal with Reese until they met in front of a time displacement machine and Reese decided to go on a suicide mission for John for no reason.

And that wasn't going to happen. And no matter how much he felt that anything nice he could ever do for Reese would feel like he was manipulating him in the direction he needed to go – and no matter how much maybe it was – there was no changing it. He had to go – now, again later, who knew how many times before the end. And the irony was that if he hadn't known, he would have been to medical weeks ago, and he'd have made time to show this young soldier who had saved not only John but his daughter as well how much he appreciated that. And they would probably be friends by now. And instead Reese thought he hated him for some reason and everyone thought he was an asshole and it changed _nothing_.

For a while John felt like howling, Like throwing something at the wall. Like cursing his mother, long and loudly, for doing this to him. Why did she have to tell him? What difference did it make?

It had never helped him in any way. Anything he had done in regard to Reese where things he would have done anyway. There were things he should have done that he never did because he knew and was a coward. There were things that he could have done for Reese knowing what he did, but he'd missed every chance. If his mother had only wanted him to know because she thought she s owed it to both of them, then he wished he could tell her it wasn't worth it. _He_ sure as fuck didn't profit from it. And neither did Reese. He'd never know anyway. What was the point?

If his mother had wanted him to know because she'd wanted him to do something for his father, make his short life a little less shitty, than he had failed completely.

If she had wanted to punish him because he would get the only man she'd ever truly loved killed, that, at least, had been a full success. John hated himself for thinking that way, and he never did so for long, but he did it now, and the thought never completely left his system. He knew he was being unfair. He knew his mother had loved him so much, and would have done so even if he hadn't been meant to be the savior of the world. Wouldn't she? Because he was, and he would never know. Because Sarah had been his drill sergeant more than she had been his mother and he'd never really had a chance to know her.

She'd only allowed herself to look sad when she thought he wasn't looking.

How would life have gone if the world hadn't ended? If they had managed to save it before it was broken?

Would his mother have dropped the soldier act and become just his mom for whatever was left of is childhood? Would he have have gotten to actually get to know her as a person? He had an idea of who she had been, but the glimpses he had caught of her were few and far in between. And in the end there was no point to all the wondering and regret. What had happened happened and nothing could change it. Knowing the future hadn't changed it, wouldn't change it, wasn't changing it. Things just happened the way they did and then they had happened that way, and they'd always be that way.

John took a deep breath. He needed to calm down before anyone else could come in. And then he needed to take care of business.

 

-

 

The next time John entered medical, it was empty. Kate was there. Hank was there, not in any kind of medical function but to do some paperwork and discuss some structural changes, by the look of it. They were both sitting at the desk and mercifully, neither paid him much mind.

The next room was empty, too, except for Reese. Rengith was gone now, probably released for no longer being in danger of dropping dead from infection the moment Kate and her team no longer watched over him. It was no small danger. Taking antibiotics once wasn't enough. Even taking them until the infection seemed to be gone and then stopping only led to it coming back worse. Many a patient had stopped taking the pills the moment they thought they could survive without them, in a well meaning attempt to preserve their limited supplies, only to then waste the ones they had already taken by dying a pointless death.

John hoped Rengith wouldn't make that mistake. On top of everything else, it would make Jeannie feel bad. Then he had no other choice but to place his attention on the sole occupant of the room, who was still here because he couldn't even stand.

He was awake and staring at the wall through heavy lidded eyes, probably bored to tears but too miserable to do anything about it. John had been there. (Barely. He was usually surrounded by more people when he was injured.)

For the first time in years, John forced himself to really look at the young soldier. The last time they had met in person, Reese had been barely a teenager – too young, thin, and dirty to have more of a passing similarity with the man John only knew from low resolution images. Six years later this had changed. Reese was still on the thin side, his hair was too long and shaggy and his face was pale and gaunt with sickness, but he was undeniably the same man as the one on the picture, standing on a catwalk beside John's mother forty-two years ago. It was so surreal, so absurd, that John nearly turned around to flee before Reese could see him.

This was it. This was real now. History was flowing around him and he could do nothing but swim along, finally feeling the inescapable current drag him onward.

Then Reese's attention fell on him and the moment was cemented in time. No turning back. The eyes widened slightly in surprise and John noted that they were green. He hadn't known that; no, he had, but he hadn't really seen it before, the few pictures he had at his disposal not offering enough color and light to see, and the last time they had met John hadn't been paying attention.

Now he couldn't look away. His own eyes were blue. His mom's eyes. And dark hair from some side of the family that he had never met. Reese's hair was dirty blond and sticking in all directions as he tried to push himself into a sitting position.

John could see him struggle, but he understood. In a situation like this he wouldn't have wanted to lie down vulnerably like that either. He thought about his own position, wondered if he looked threatening standing in the doorway like he was. He usually was more thoughtful than this when he had the time to be but this situation completely threw him off his game, no matter how long he'd had to prepare for it. They were on equal footing here, and Reese didn't even know it.

He was even at an advantage, John though, because he didn't know anything beyond the fact that his General had finally dragged his ass down here to see him. He could just go through this moment without it meaning anything. John envied him. At the same time he had the brief, crazy thought to tell him everything and no longer be alone in this.

He wasn't _that_ crazy. And he wasn't that much of an asshole.

“Sir,” Reese greeted him. John searched his voice for anything to steer this conversation by. Did he sound eager? Wary? He couldn't tell. Mostly Reese sounded pained and short of breath. Movement was obviously a problem and with a flash of shame John realized that the last time he'd been here, Reese had been sitting upright in bed just because someone had helped him get there. The thought prompted him to quickly move forward and stuff two of the pillows lying under the bed for just this purpose underneath Reese's back.

“Easy, Soldier,” he said. “This is not an official visit. You can go through it lying down.” He tried to smile but it all felt so flat. It felt as if he had separated from his body and it was now going through this scene in a pre-programmed manner while John could only watch.

Reese muttered something that sounded like “Thank you” but could have been something else as he settled heavily against the pillows. John distantly wondered what Kate would do to him if he damaged her patient any further. The thought nearly made him laugh. It did make him smile and he hoped that this time it looked a little better.

Reese didn't say anything else, just watching him as he stood awkwardly beside the bed. He had no idea where this was going, John realized. John had to give him something to react to if he wanted any reaction at all.

“I'm here to thank you,” he finally said, and he finally sat down just at the edge of the bed, as far from the injured solder as he could without looking like he was actively trying to avoid him. Just so he looked less imposing towering over the other. He and Reese were the same height now, but as the only one standing he was still looming.

“I was just doing my duty,” Reese replied after a pause. It didn't sound very sincere, although John had to admit that that might have been the weakness in his voice. He also had to admit that the time had passed for his own words to sound sincere, rather than something he needed to say to appease other people.

“I know you were,” he acknowledged, trying to sound more genuine. He used to be good at this, didn't he? Win over crowds with some well placed words and by meaning them. Why did everything sound so insufficient now? “And you did it well. As you commander, I am proud of you.”

It was true, but it was also a phrase, and it sounded so trite when John just now realized that he was also proud as a son. His father was the kind of person who took bullets for virtual strangers. The kind of dad normal kids bragged about in the schoolyard. And he had known that, of course, but now was the moment he really _got_ it, and there was nothing he could do to keep conflicting emotions from crashing over him at the worst possible moment. He could keep them out of his voice, though. Off his face. “As a father,” he continued, and had to stop for a second until he was certain his voice was calm. “I am very, very grateful. My daughter would be dead without you.” And it didn't matter in this moment that John wouldn't know because he'd be dead as well.

“Sir,” Reese said. “You protected Louisa. She wouldn't have been hit anyway.”

Hearing him speak of John's daughter like that, like they knew each other, threw John for a moment, before he remembered that they did. Lou spend a lot of time here, according to Kate. She like Reese, and apparently Jeannie had taken a shine to him as well. John shook his head.

“I was only alive to do so because of you,” he pointed out. “So let me thank you, okay?”

“Yes, Sir,” Reese said with his hoarse voice. He still sounded neutral, wary even. John didn't know what to make of it, how to react to it. Equal footing. They were both scrambling their way through this conversation, neither of them sure what the other really thought.

Reese probably didn't think John was particularly grateful, or that he really wanted to be here. John had waited too long. Maybe now Reese waited for him to reveal what he had done to offend his General so, since he apparently couldn't stand him.

“I'm sorry for not coming earlier,” John tried. “I wanted to talk to you as soon as you were aware enough to hear me, but something always came up.”

“I don't mind, Sir. There are much more important things to take care of.” That, at least, had sounded genuine. John could tell Reese really meant it.

But doubtlessly he had also noticed that John had come for Rengith and Miller and completely ignored him at the occasion. “I still should have made time.”

“It's not important, Sir. I know this is inconvenient.”

“Okay.” John took a deep breath. “Will you just let me finish, man? I am trying to apologize here.”

Reese stared at him. John stared back. He hadn't mean to talk like that. He hadn't talked like that, outside of his family, since he'd been a teenager.

“I'm...” Reese trailed off, tried again. “I'm not sure what you're apologizing for, Sir. You owe me nothing. If anything, I'm to one who needs to apologize. I'm aware that my injury's been causing trouble.”

He said that so casually that John didn't even get what he was talking about at first. Then he wanted to get angry at whoever had thought it appropriate to tell the badly injured man that most people thought they should have let him die.

Then he realized that for all the Reese was a little awkward, he wasn't stupid, and he had probably figured that out for himself.

And it occurred to John, for the first time, that maybe Reese thought John had avoided him because he resented him for being alive. That he might think keeping him from dying had been a waste of effort and resources, or that he blamed him for the trouble it was causing.

“Listen,” John started, because he couldn't take this guy by the shoulders and shake him. “I actually told Kate that she should do anything she could to save your life, and I'm happy it worked. I'd do it again. And I should have come earlier and I didn't because I wanted to catch you alone, and now I realized that that may have led some people to wrong conclusions.”

Reese looked mostly just lost now. He really wasn't great with any kind of conversation. John remembered his mom telling him how she'd asked him to talk to her about anything one time and he'd been completely hopeless. Now he was expected to react to John's words and obviously had no idea how to. He wasn't even looking at him anymore. John should have asked Lou how to talk to the guy; she didn't seem to have any problem with it. For now, he decided to have mercy.

“I remember you from years ago, you know,” he said. “When you first came here, Kate was checking you over and I came in and startled you, so you grabbed our baby and tried to run away with it because you thought I was going to hurt him.” After the conversation John had overheard earlier, the whole thing seemed even darker than it had anyway. It was hardly surprising that someone who had spend their life in a place like that thought the worst of every man they came across.

Reese ducked his head, going even paler. “I'm sorry,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

John actually laughed. It felt weird, but it was real. “I wanted to thank you for that as well. You didn't even know Casey, and you still wanted to keep him safe, even though you didn't know who I was and that I wouldn't hurt you. That was pretty amazing. Kate told me you felt bad about it and you really don't need to. There are a lot of soldiers in our ranks that I wish were more like you.”

Reese just stared at him now, confused and if anything even more at a loss for words. Maybe this was a good moment for John to leave. He'd said what he had to say, he'd even apologized – for all intents and purposes, the thing he had so feared to face was over. He was free.

But he couldn't leave like this. Not while Reese was still mostly just overwhelmed and John didn't know what he was thinking. He couldn't leave at this note. It would make this whole thing seem exactly as forced as it had been.

And evidently, Reese had some trouble taking a genuine compliment, as he still hadn't thought of a response.

“When I was a kid,” John said, because he felt it was up to him to fill this silence and have this meeting end in a manner they could both live with, “my mother raised me in a very specific way.” He nearly laughed at that, because, yeah, understatement. “For instance, it was very important to her that I understood how every life is precious and should be protected. Since my mom was the only person I really had around me for most of my childhood, I came to be convinced that everyone ought to share that view. I knew, of course, that there were bad people all over the world, because I saw them on TV and because Mom warned me about them a lot, but somehow, they weren't real. The people I met in person and had to deal with were, and I just thought they all shared Mom's belief and her bravery.” He stopped for a moment, lost in memories. Lately, he had spend so much time being angry at his mother that he had forgotten that the legendary Sarah Connor who had been so brave, compassionate and dedicated had not been someone he had invented. “Sadly that was not the case,” he finally continued. “After Judgment Day, when everything was on fire and no help was coming, I went to every survivor I could find expecting them to understand that they could only survive by helping each other, and that they would readily help those who couldn't help themselves. And I had to realize that most of them were too involved with their own survival and misery to reach out to others and were, in fact, quite ready to screw others over for their own advantage.”

“But people followed you anyway,” Reese pointed out. It almost hurt John to see the same admiration in him that he had already seen in almost anyone else. Reese wasn't shocked about people being selfish assholes – he'd known that. He was impressed with John being able to make them do better.

“Not at first. I approached this whole thing pretty naively. I knew I was right, and I thought everyone would agree with me, and while I also knew that some of the things my mom predicted and trained me for would be hard to believe, I kind of assumed the biggest obstacle would be the fact that I was very young back then, and people wouldn't want to listen to a kid.”

“How old where you, Sir?”

At least he was talking now. And since John couldn't imagine Reese had never heard a story about the beginning of the war and how John Connor united what was left of the population of this continent, he could even assume that he already knew the answer and was actively trying to aid John in this conversation. That was a relief. “Twelve,” John said. And Reese frowned a little as if he didn't see what the problem was, so maybe he hadn't known after all. “It wasn't the same as being twelve years old now,” John explained. “Back then, at that age, you were a child, and no one thought your opinion had any value. I had to lie about my age just so people would listen for five minutes.”

“How did you convince them?”

Reese appeared to be genuinely interested, and a lot more comfortable now the conversation was no longer about him. John snorted softly. “I adjusted my tactic. Made them understand that it was in their own best interest to listen to me and work together. I was able to predict some things, like the changes in the climate, because my mother had been prepared for things like that and learned all about it, and passed the knowledge on to me. Once my predictions became reality, people were more inclined to listen.” It had been a pretty hard time, though, and John had to move on from many a place in the first weeks before he found one where he could stay and have people help him help them. “Also, I met Hernandez, who not only was willing to listen but also older than me and already well respected, so that helped a lot.”

“You mother was well prepared,” Reese said with open admiration in his voice. John had his full attention now, and that was almost intimidating.

“She was. And she made sure I was, too, in case something happened to her.” John had often wondered if Sarah had known she wouldn't live through Judgment Day. She must have known it was a possibility, at the very least. “Basically, I'm just carrying out her legacy. Anyway,” he quickly continued, before his thoughts and the conversation could travel to places he didn't want them to go. “What I'm trying to say is that as a kid I had imagined to world to be full of people like you, and it wasn't, and that was a big disappointment.”

“I can't imagine that, Sir,” Reese replied quietly, though John didn't know if he really thought people hadn't been that bad, or if he couldn't imagine having high expectations in them in the first place.

“Well, I'm being too harsh. There were a lot of people who would even sacrifice themselves to help others – everything was just made more difficult by those who would not. When I started traveling through the country trying to warn everyone of the machines and gather an army, I came across many places that were already established as bases designed to keep as many people as possible safe and run by people who were dedicated to keep all those strangers alive. That's how I met Kate and her father.”

“Good people,” Reese agreed quietly.

“Yeah. I guess you had amble opportunity to get to know Kate.” John turned around and was not surprised to see his wife – not standing in the doorway but watching them none the less from further into the other room. “You worked with Bob Brewster once, didn't you?” Of course John knew all about that. Just like he knew all there was to find out about every mission this soldier had been on.

Reese nodded. “Couple years ago. He was a good leader. Good man.”

It didn't sound like a platitude. John could tell he meant it. “So you've heard, then.”

“Yes, Commander Perry told me.”

That was a little surprising. Bob had died not two weeks ago, but while word had traveled quickly, Reese had been firmly out of it and more dead than alive at that point, and John had been certain he hadn't heard yet. It was upsetting news, and there seemed to be no point in telling someone who had other things to worry about at the moment. Like breathing.

But then, Reese was being cared for by Kate all the time, and perhaps Justin had wanted to keep him from unwittingly upsetting her. Or he'd just thought that Reese could handle it and deserved to know. Death, even the death of people one respected and liked, didn't have as much of an impact as it did when John had been a child and it hadn't happened every single day.

The death of Robert Brewster, however, had been something that affected them all. Short of John dying, this was possibly the loss to hit them the hardest. The General of the North was a legend in his own right, and the population of the North, thinly spread as it was, was struggling with the new reality of their protector being gone.

It would have been a lot worse if Bob hadn't taken precautions for just this event, that he had seen coming years ahead. He had trained some trusted men and women just to fill his shoes and let them take over more and more public roles, to get their army and the people they protected to trust them. It made John wonder what would happen when _he_ died one day – whether he should try harder to find his own replacement. Perhaps he was relying too heavily on the assumption that his time couldn't come yet.

Thoughts for another moment. John turned around again to see Kate still watching them, although she was also busy sorting through a cabinet. She had taken the news better than he had expected. Maybe the fact that she had seen her father maybe five times in the past fifteen years had contributed to that. Or perhaps she was just very good at hiding her feelings.

“Sir.” Reese's voice pulled him out of his thoughts. “How much longer will Perry be stationed here?”

That was a good question. The weather had kept anyone from leaving for a while, but by now there was nothing keeping Justin and some others from returning to their divisions, except a few missions John had planned them in for. “Hard to say,” he replied. “At least a few weeks. There's something coming up that'll take time.”

Reese didn't reply and no longer looked at John. It was a little hard to read him because he kept his face carefully blank, but also rather easy, because John could imagine what he was worrying about. “Plenty of time for you to get back to your feet,” he assured the much, much younger man. “Don't worry, they won't leave without you.”

“I should be helping them,” Reese muttered.

“Ideally,” John agreed drily. “And my mom should be alive. Fact is, she's not, and fact is, you're in no condition to do anything for them. So stay in bed, let Kate and her team take care of you, and get back into fighting condition as quickly as you can. That's the best you can do for them right now.”

Even as he spoke the words, John was thinking. About how Reese would somehow end up in his own team some time next year. Why? Right now it would make no sense to take him out of the one he was in. So why wouldn't he stay with Justin and the 132nd? Because John requested him based on the fact that he knew this had to happen? Or because the 132nd got whipped out? Possibly while Reese was here, safe?

Was he sending Justin and his men to their death with the next mission?

And what was he doing here, talking to his own father like a parent would? The oddity of the situation hit John all of a sudden and he fell back into autopilot mode. Why would he take this guy into his team unless he had to? Being around him was something to be avoided at all costs.

Reese nodded. Like someone who had thought about John's words and found that he was right. Not happy about it but accepting after listening to what was said to him and considering it. If things were different, John would probably really like this kid. Damn, he needed to go!

Twenty minutes later, after he _had_ gone, and retreated to his rooms under the pretense of needing to pick something up before his next meeting, Kate came to him. “Perry's gonna move out of here in a few weeks?” she asked. “Define 'a few weeks', please.”

John frowned. He sat in the chair before the desk and his hands were empty because he hadn't done anything for three precious minutes. The visit in medical had taken far too long. He was needed elsewhere. “I don't know. It depends on how the mission goes. Three weeks minimum, but not much longer than that. His division needs him back. I'd say they'll be out of here at the end of December. Early January, at the latest. Why?”

“Because you told Kyle that they wouldn't leave before he was back to his feet, and that won't happen in a few weeks. In a few weeks, if he's lucky, he'll be able to stand. Maybe walk a few steps, with help. He definitely won't be able to make the trip all the way to the other end of the state.”

John's frown deepened. He didn't want to talk about Reese, and he was confused. “He didn't look that bad.”

“Yeah, Which of us is the doctor here?” Kate ran a hand over her face. She looked tired. John tried to see if she also looked like she was still grieving but her face was firmly locked in the moment. He wished he knew her better. “Just,” she said. “Don't make promises you can't keep. He's not even out of the woods yet. I don't want him pushing himself too hard.”

“Okay.” John wasn't going to discuss this. He didn't want to think about it. Reese would end up with him some time next year and he didn't know how. Something would happen, and other things would not, and he suddenly realized that he had no influence at all over what did and what didn't. Had he ever made a decision that would have been different if he hadn't known the future? At all? If not, what was the point of worrying about it?

Maybe he could just forget...

Kate came over, ran a hand over his shoulder. He became aware, distantly, of the time that had passed since she had last touched him. “I don't know what made it so hard for you to talk to him, but I'm glad you finally did it. And longer than I thought, too.”

“I didn't mean to stay too long. It wasn't as bad as I had thought,” John admitted, and then he realized that he needed to follow that up with an explanation. “He reminds me of someone, that is all. From before the war. I don't know why that made it so hard. Probably because it made me think of Mom a lot.”

The lie came over his lips with an ease that almost shocked him. John was used to lying to people. He wasn't used to lying to Kate, like this. Not this easily. If he had to, he always felt like she could see right through him. Not now.

He could just tell her. Kate knew so much already. He could share this and maybe she would give him some guidelines on how to get through this without being an ass. No longer alone.

“Who?” Kate asked. She sat down. For lack of another chair in the room, she sat on his lap. John ran his fingers through her hair, very short now, and thought about asking her to let it grow out until the war ended. See how long it would get.

“Someone I grew up with, more or less. He meant more to my mom than me, really, but Reese is a lot like him, for what I can tell. Even the names are similar. I don't know why this gets me so. I'm sorry. I've been kind of an ass.”

“You have,” Kate agreed. “But you fixed it. That's why I love you. And I guess sometimes the sad memories just pile up until one pushes you over the edge, and it can be completely random. I've been there.”

He kissed her temple. “I'm sorry,” he said again. “Here I am wining about random people I hardly knew because my mom died thirty years ago, when you just lost your dad.”

“It's okay,” she told him. “I often felt that I also lost him thirty years ago. It's not like my life drastically changed now that he's not around anymore, since he was never around in the first place.” She looked sad, though, for a moment.

“He was a good man, and a good leader,” John told her. “It's been a loss for all of us.”

“I don't disagree. And I'm really proud of him. It's just that, as a citizen of this planet, I am proud of him and grateful for all the things he's done for us. As a daughter I mostly just wonder where he has been all my life.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that I often felt the same way about my mother?”

“Not at all.” Kate sighed. “We curse our parents, and then we become just like them. Where have we been in the lives of our children?”

“Our childrens' lives are not over.”

“Yeah, but is it ever gonna be different than now? Even when the war is won – who will rebuild the world? Don't tell me that's not gonna be us.”

“Jeannie can help. She'll have time, since there won't be any more machines to blow up.”

Kate boxed him in the chest. “I'm serious,” she said, but she was smiling.

“So am I.” John kissed her. “I don't know. I might just retire. Sometimes I'm just tired of all this. Too tired not to be an ass to random strangers.”

“I think you've been forgiven. If you were ever blamed in the first place. I'm afraid poor Kyle thought it was something wrong with him that made you avoid him.”

“I gathered that. Doesn't make me feel any better.”

“It shouldn't. She kissed him back, but he knew she meant her words. “I'm just glad this has been dealt with.”

“You're awfully concerned with this guy,” John mentioned carefully.

“Well, he's my patient. That's kind of my job. Also, I like him. Kinda hard not to.”

Yeah, John thought, but didn't say. That was kind of the problem.


	28. 2027 - 1/3

“That one's one of my favorites,” Louisa said, handing over another magazine. “We even discussed it in class once. It's not on anything special, though. I like the pictures.” The final words sounded a little subdued, and Reese looked at her in surprise. Louisa was usually all about the information a magazine provided, and whenever she learned something new, she'd come and tell it to him. That she liked something just because it was nice to look at was unusual.

The magazine _was_ nice to look at, though. Kyle quickly found himself drawn into and fascinated by the full-page drawings and the accompanying photos, taking in every detail. Staring at every page for minutes.

Louisa waited for him to keep going with some degree of patience. She didn't say anything but he could tell that she was anxious for him to turn the pages, and so he did, thinking that maybe she would leave him the magazine for a while so he'd get a chance to look at the pictures again and read the descriptions.

“It's on the seven wonders of the ancient world,” Louisa explained unnecessarily. It was right there on the cover. Reese just didn't know what it meant. “That one's my favorite,” the girl added, pointing to the colorful drawing on the left. “The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. They just are so amazing. All those plants, and an entire structure bigger than this base just there to house those plants. I wish I could have seen that.”

“Me too,” Reese agreed. He was, once again, taken in by the detailed, lovingly made drawing depicting what those gardens had looked like. Or might have looked like, in any case. He'd caught enough of the description to understand that they had been lost without any actual images of them remaining.

Perhaps, he thought, the artist wished he could have seen them, too.

“The others are pretty cool, too, though,” Louisa remarked. “Especially the pyramid in Egypt, since that one's the only one actually still existing.” She stopped. “Well, it still existed when that book was printed, anyway. I don't know if it still does. I tried to find out. Dad has contact with people all over the world, so I thought he could just ask the ones in Egypt if the Pyramid's still there, but by the time I even learned what that was, Egypt had been silent for months.”

Reese nodded, not sure what to say. He only had a vague idea what Egypt even was, but he knew it was a country on another continent, which meant it was not some place they could ever reach with the means they had. He knew it had fallen silent about a year ago. Word had traveled around, though few really cared. No one knew what had happened. Maybe everyone was dead, maybe they just had lost their tools of communication. It happened. Sometimes, parts of the world stopped communicating, and sometimes they never started again.

Reese turned the page and sure enough there it was: a great pyramid reaching up into the sky. On the drawing, it was surrounded by tiny figures in colorful clothes, their skin brown and their hair black in a way that reminded him of Laina and Cecilia, although he knew those two had come from a very different part of the world. The people in the drawing were too small to have faces. Reese did not remember Cecilia's face all that well. He remembered Laina's face.

On the opposite page was a photograph of the pyramids at a much later point in history. It was back and white and the people seen on it were different shades of gray wearing clothes in different shades of gray. The pyramid looked the same. Older, yet unchanged.

All the drawings where contrasted with photos of how the sites, or supposed sites, of the ancient wonders looked at the time of printing. Some photos showed ruins, some nothing at all that indicated a structure worthy of the name had ever stood there. It was odd to see that, this ruin in the world before the war. Reese sometimes found it hard to imagine that in that world things had also ended and turned to dust.

Louisa looked at her watch. It was an old piece, predating the war like almost all watches, and clunky. Even at the tightest setting it turned loosely around her thin wrist so she had to turn it with her other hand until the display faced up. “I got a class in half an hour,” she explained with some regret. Then she grinned at Reese. “They are letting me teach some of the little ones all on my own today.”

“That's great!”, Resse told her. Louisa had been trying to convince her teachers to let her give lessons on her own for a while now. He knew about it because she had told him about it, and how frustrating it was that none of them would trust her just because she was only thirteen years old. It wasn't fair, she said, that they wouldn't let her do this, but wouldn't have any problem with it if she picked up a gun and went out to fight the machines, and he had to agree with her. Louisa was a good teacher. He could attest to that. In the many weeks he had been stuck here, she had helped him a lot with getting better at reading and at understanding texts that had been beyond him before because they referred to things completely outside his frame of experience.

That they wouldn't let her teach the younger ones seemed just silly, especially considering that all two of the other available teachers were busy with other things, so if she didn't take over the class, the class wouldn't happen. Apparently the grown ups had thought that if Louisa were to teach for the first time, someone should be there to make sure she didn't make a mess of it. Reese thought they should trust her more. He understood her frustration.

He also had his own frustration to struggle with. As soon as Louisa was gone he pushed himself up and out of bed, keeping an eye on the doorway to make sure no one saw him do it. Kate would get irritated and he didn't want to be more of a nuisance to her than he already was. But he also didn't want to stay here any longer than he absolutely had to, and he needed to get his strength back quickly.

So far, his strength did a pretty good job being elsewhere. Reese's legs shook as he stood carefully, and the pain in his torso seemed to pull and seep out into his limps. He had to hold on to the edge not to fall and he had to stand very still for a moment while he waited for the dizziness to pass.

Kate, Jim, or Hannah helped him stand about once a day and supported him while they walked up and down the room in an exercise that took barely than ten minutes even after weeks of working on it, and yet always left Reese exhausted and out of breath. His body felt heavy and useless and like an enemy. Like that time he had been sick as a child, only worse because it didn't seem to get better, and he never reached the point where he didn't care if he died. Dying wasn't the issue here. Not being able to return to his division when the time came was.

He didn't know how much time he had left until Perry and the others would return North, but he knew he was rapidly running out of it. He didn't know what he would do if he wasn't ready to go with them then, but the thought frightened him more than the idea of dying ever could.

With the support of the bed he managed to take a few shaky steps until he reached the end of it, then he turned and walked back. He'd hoped it would get easier with the repetition, but no progress seemed willing to happen. When he reached the point where he started for the second time, black dots were dancing in front of his eyes.

This was as far as he'd ever made it on his own. Feeling his shirt cling to his body and struggling to draw breath into lungs constricted by both pain and exertion, he faced the decision he had to make: If he went back to the foot end of the bed again, he'd go further than before and could mark this as actual progress. But he would also risk falling, and that could tear open his wounds and set him back by weeks.

Reese bit his lips. And took another shaky step. If he didn't make it back to fighting condition in a few weeks, he it wouldn't matter anyway _how_ far exactly he was from it.

He made it to the end of the bed shaking and sweating. There was a brief moment of triumph, followed by a moment of desperation when he realized he had to take at least four of five of his tiny steps back before he could crawl back into bed. And that he had to crawl back into bed. Gravity was, once again, the adversary.

The last bit was less about walking with the support of the bed and more dragging himself along the edge of the bed with some support from his legs. He finally deemed himself high enough and just sank forward until he was half on the mattress, face down, twisting his torso jut enough to not lie directly on his wounds that were flaring with pain now. In a long, slow process he dragged one leg up, then the other. He had definitely overdone it. The pillow was further away that he had thought. He couldn't drag himself up. He could get the blanket over him even as he started to shiver in his damp clothes. All he could do was lie there and breathe, completely useless.

When he became fully aware of his surrounding next, he was lying on his back, half-propped up on a bunch of pillows, and wrapped tightly in his blanket. The light was on but dim, as it always was. It was very quiet, the way it always was. There was only the sense of a lot of time having passed that gave Reese the impression that it was daytime outside – the time when most people inside the bunker were asleep.

A loud, dry cough from the other room startled him. He heard a voice – Kate's voice – say something too quiet to make out, and then the cough came again. Maybe that was even what had woken him up. Reese stared at the ceiling. He breathed in and out.

The sounds and voices from the other room continued. He listened, awake but unable to work up the energy to move. It felt like the world was muted and distant around him. At some point he realized that the voices had fallen silent. Then Kate appeared in the door and came towards him. Her face looked very stern, but it was also a very kind face. Kyle wasn't afraid of her. He closed his eyes when she placed a cool hand on his forehead.

“You're running a fever again,” she told him. “I bet you're feeling like shit.”

Did he? Kyle tried to analyze how he was feeling. Pain in his torso, strong but steady, no ups and downs. Bearable. Pain in his head, lessening somewhat when he closed his eyes. Dry mouth. Tight spots on his cheeks, like dried tear tracks. Too warm underneath the blanket. A constriction on his chest that made breathing an effort and had nothing to do with being sick. “I do,” he finally agreed.

“Good. You should. Learn something from it.”

“What?” Kyle asked, because his brain wasn't working right and it seemed to him that he was expected to say something here. His eye were still closed, so he didn't know what kind of face Kate made, but he thought that her silence was a little too long. Or maybe he had fallen asleep again.

“This hasn't improved your situation,” the doctor's voice sounded near his ear. “You know that you're not supposed to get out of bed without anyone else here to help you. And you'd already had your exercise today.”

“It's not enough,” Reese replied with his dry and scratchy voice. “I need much more exercise than that. I've been here for far too long.”

Kate sighed. “Even if you were right – if you feel you could go again and want to wander around, you still have to call us in so someone can help you and keep an eye on you.”

“You're always so busy,” Reese explained, with his eyes still closed. “I won't be more of a bother than I already am.”

Kate made a sound of frustration. “If you hurt yourself you will be much more of a bother, Kid!”

“I know. I know my limit now. Don't worry about it.”

“I want to strangle you sometimes, you know?”

It seemed like a rhetorical question, so Reese didn't answer.

He was more alert now, could actually _feel_ the hours of restless boredom and listless frustration ahead of him in which he would be unable to find rest or focus on any kind of distraction. He had been here long enough to know what that felt like before it happened.

With Kate's help he sat up more, hating how weak he was. She handed him a cub of water and he was glad when she let him hold it on his own even though his hands were shaking. The water was nice; it made him realize how thirsty he was. When it was gone he was still thirsty but said nothing, used to an existence in which supplies were limited.

She stuck around for a bit and Reese could tell that even though she was displeased with him, she was trying to keep him company. He appreciated that but could never think of anything to say in reply to her gentle prompts. Eventually she left because she had some organizational things to take care of in the other room and he was left to stare at nothing by himself.

After a while he reached for the magazine Louisa had left him earlier, now half-buried by the pillows he was resting against. He flipped through the pages he had wanted so much to study in more detail earlier, but as he had known would be the case, his mind refused to linger on anything for more than a second.

His reading had gotten pretty good in the three months he had been stuck in this room. That was the one good thing that had come out of his injury: for the first time ever he had chance to read, and to study all the things he was fascinated by but that weren't important enough to warrant spending precious time on usually. Louisa had helped him a lot – as soon as she had figured out that he wasn't all that good at reading and writing but would like to get better, she had started bringing pens and paper and all the books she could get away with taking from their places.

There had been no poetry among it, and Reese hadn't wanted to ask for anything specific, trying not to cause her any more trouble than he already was. Louisa enjoyed explaining things to him, though – he could tell. She was a good teacher and he was glad they finally let her do more of that. Her first class had to be over by now, didn't it? He wondered how that had gone. Maybe when she came back next time, he'd get to ask her...

His thoughts drifted. They never came anywhere near sleep, but they wouldn't stick on one trail either. Kyle hated feeling this way. He felt his eyes fill with tears and he hated that, too.

Listlessly, he turned another page. His eyes got drawn to the photograph of a city in a country called Greece, taken, according to the caption, in 1978. He looked at the buildings, the cars, the people, and tried to imagine that world where they were all still alive and didn't know the end was less than twenty years away. Most of the people on that street weren't that old, so most of them were probably still around in 1997 and died on Judgment Day.

His thoughts, disconnected as they were, drifted to Sarah Connor. From all that Reese had heard about her in the bunkers and on the road, and sometimes from John Connor himself when he stopped for a brief visit, she had known that they world was at the edge of destruction and had fought to prevent all this. Reese didn't know how much of that legend was based on facts – listening to the talk one might come to believe she had been able to see the future – but he knew that she had fought this war, one way or another, long before anyone else. Her son had confirmed that she had known about CyberDyne, the company behind Skynet, and that she had tried to stop them from creating something they couldn't control.

He had also told Reese a lot about the world as it had been. Strange, random details that never came up in the nostalgic takes of the older ones – like ATMs and how people dressed and how it wasn't okay to run around with a gun in plain sight. Reese didn't even know why anyone would want to run around with a gun in a world not populated by machines that wanted to kill them, and with laws, and people everywhere, most of whom probably weren't evil.

Thinking about that time made him sad, because it was over. All those things that fascinated him about it were gone, all the good things that those people used to take for granted replaced with a frozen wasteland and dead bodies. Reese wondered sometimes if it could be true that Sarah Connor had known the end was near. He hoped not. How could anyone bear to look at a world like that knowing its days were numbered? That there wasn't enough time left for their children to grow up, and that everyone they loved would die, if they were lucky.

He hoped she hadn't known, but if she had, he could see why she had done everything she could to prevent it.

Connor's visit still came as a bit of a surprise to Reese, even though he was slowly getting used to them. The man had been a little intimidating at first, but Reese had discovered that there was a warmth in him that made it easy to trust him, and made Reese understand that people were willing to die for him not just for his leadership.

He had never come just for Reese. He'd always come for Kate or Louisa, or Hernandez, one time the man was laid up here overnight with a concussion. But he always stayed for a few minutes to talk to Reese, and Reese had found himself disappointed the few times he had missed it because he'd been asleep and Connor hadn't wanted to wake him,

Apparently his assumption that the General had avoided him out of disdain over the events of their first encounter or because he found Reese's performance as a soldier lacking in some way had been unfounded. It was more of a relief that Reese had anticipated. He couldn't fault the man if he didn't like him for any reason, be it rational or not, but he found that he didn't like it. He wanted Connor's approval, and that was a first in a way. There was something genuine about his leader – as if he could see right into a person and if he didn't like them, it was because they weren't good enough...

So maybe there was a reason why he rarely looked Reese in the eyes...

Reese sighed and leaned back more heavily against the pillows. He wished he could sleep. More than that, he wished he could get out of this bed and back to Perry, Sommer, and the others. They were out on a mission right now and expected back within a week. It wasn't a long mission, it didn't taken them far out. The weather was too bad to go far, and that was the only reason why they were still here at all.

As soon as that thought wandered through Reese's mind, he felt that need to get up and move about again, as if every moment spend in this bed was a wasted opportunity. He _needed_ to get stronger so he could leave with them when they left. He needed to leave with them, because he didn't know what he should do if they left him behind.

He sighed in frustration, itching to get up, yet lacking the strength for it. And also knowing better. Still, all he wanted that moment was for Kate to come in and assure him that everything would be alright and he would be back in fighting shape before the month was over.

  


-

  


“It's not going to happen,” Kate said, quite firmly, from her position on the chair.

“I can do it,” Kyle said, equally firmly, from his position on the bed.

He wasn't lying in it. He was sitting on the edge, dressed in real pants for the first time in months. Getting into them must have been painful enough, but that didn't seem to have discouraged him.

“You really can't. I've seen this often enough. Someone recovers from an injury, and feels fit again, and then they get out on the field, run out of steam in a matter of hours, and die or are killed. That's exactly where you are right now. You think you are strong enough. You're really not.”

In response, Kyle just looked at her. She could see the determination in his eyes – it was, she found, the same look she'd seen in John's eyes often enough, when he'd come to a decision he wasn't going to back off from.

She could only hope that this kid was a little more flexible. Or that, at least, someone would pull rank on him.

“Listen,” she said. “I have never enjoyed any kind of official medical education. I have learned a lot from real doctors I have worked with, but many things I still had to learn plain and simply from experience. And that's how I know you won't make it if you leave with Perry and the others now. Because I've seen it happen before, to people I took care of for weeks, whom I had spend a lot of time and effort and resources on before I released them, believing they were okay. They were not. And then they were dead. I'm not going to let that happen to you.”

“I appreciate your help,” Kyle said with the inflection of someone who had learned those words two days ago out of context and was trying them for size. “But I know what I am doing.”

And when Kate met his eyes, she realized that he did. He was well aware that when he left here now, he would likely die – if not on the way back to his division, then shortly after in battle, as he was lacking the strength and quickness that would keep him alive. And he accepted that. Because death wasn't nearly as bad as staying behind. Death could hit him anywhere, any time. He was used to that. But he identified as a soldier under Justin Perry's command and without that, he would be lost.

“I know you're worried,” she tried. “But it's not like there's no place for you in the army anymore if you can't stay with Perry. And it's not like you can never return to your division. It just won't be now.”

“They are constantly moving,” Kyle pointed out. “It will likely be years before they are anywhere near here again.”

“And that's exactly why you can't return to them right now. You won't make it through half a day of moving, let alone years. I won't let you go and that's final.”

Kyle didn't reply to that. Kate knew better than to think his lack f protest signaled agreement. When half an hour later she glanced into the room again, she saw him on the floor, doing push-ups, his face white with pain and grim with determination. Apparently he had made up his mind to be strong enough in two days when Perry left, no matter what.

Will power wasn't going to be enough. Not as long as Kate knew better.

She brought it up with John at the earliest opportunity. If John hadn't been there she would have brought it up with Hernandez or Jackie or any other high-ranking person available, but John was her first choice for obvious reasons. Not only was he the one who could make all the decisions without having to ask someone else first, he also felt responsible for all his soldiers and generally avoided senselessly sending them out to die. Also, despite his initial reservations, he seemed to have grown to like Kyle, which would help make him see her point, she hoped.

She didn't even have to argue for long. In fact, she didn't have to argue at all. She just needed to explain in three words what was going on and why it was bad.

He nodded slowly, the tight look on his face seeming to pull on the scars that ran down his cheek ever since the incident that had injured Kyle so badly. They were still a little red at the edges. They had changed his face into something she didn't always know.

“I'll take care of it,” he promised, and that was that.

  


-

  


Justin Perry and his men where scheduled to leave on the twenty-third of January, three days after their return from the latest mission John had them help out with. There was a lot to do and not many people around to do it, so everyone was glad for the support. It was time to leave now, however. Justin's division up North needed them just a badly, and due to weather and recurring trouble they had been gone much longer than anticipated when they left for the main base in October.

All the other groups had already left. Perry's was the last and John knew that his old friend had hoped that since he'd been given more time to recover than expected, Reese would be able to leave with them.

But he must have known that was unlikely to happen, even then. It couldn't have come as a surprise when John sought him out two days before they were set to leave and told him that Reese would stay.

He wouldn't stay to wait for Perry and the others to be in the vicinity again, nor would he be dropped off on the next group that passed through once he was back to his feet. Kate had made it very clear that that would be a terrible idea because she didn't know if there would be a set back that could kill him if not treated right, and she didn't want him to be five hundred miles away from her when that happened.

So John had decided to transfer him to his own unit – the only one that was stationed in this base permanently. It seemed like a smooth solution. Something that John would have done anyway. He didn't think about it too much.

When he had presented that solution to Reese earlier that day, the young soldier had seemed overwhelmed by the fact that he was to be part of John Connor's division, but not entirely happy about it. John could understand – it was clear that he was close to the other soldiers from them 132nd, and thought that that was where he belonged. John's suggestion meant that he was never going to go back to them (and he wasn't, John knew that all too well), but in the end he accepted the offer of a transfer. John wasn't entirely sure why he had presented it like that, rather than just making it an executive decision that could not be argued. Perhaps he had wanted Reese to come to him by choice, he thought now, when the question would not leave him alone. In that case, a treacherous little voice whispered in his mind, he should have taken into consideration that most people didn't think saying No to him was an option.

When he sort of mentioned that to Justin, though, the other man waved off his concern. “I know that kid much better than you do,” he stated what was, sadly, very true. “He tends to pick the course of action that seems to be best. Doesn't mean it always _is_ the best, but you don't need to worry that he'd sticking with you just because you intimidate him.”

“So you don't think it's the best?” John asked.

“No, I agree. I don't see any better solution. As long as you know why you are doing this. Your team has a reputation, and taking in stray kids just because they have no other place to go isn't the way to keep it.”

“Don't you think Reese qualifies?”

“Oh, I do. But anyone can see that this is unusual. I hope you know what you are doing. Also,” he added after a second, “I like Reese, and if you get him killed we will have words.”

It was said half-jokingly but it made John look forward to their first meeting after the war even less.

  


-

  


It was another two weeks before Kate allowed Kyle to leave medical for more than a few hours at a time and he gladly moved into the barracks in the back of the base with the other soldiers who were stationed here. Kate liked to think that that gladness was because he was sick of this place and of being stuck here, not because he was sick of her. She'd felt that they were getting along just fine, and had, in fact, grown to like the young man a lot.

Not just because he had saved half her family. Owing to their habit of letting those who were especially badly wounded go, she had never had a patient for this long, and in the months he had spend under her care, she had grown fond of him, even though his quiet, somewhat introverted way made it hard to get close to him. She'd gotten to know him best watching his interactions with other people, like the soldiers who occasionally dropped in for a visit, or Lou, who came almost every day, sometimes bringing Chrissy. (Christina had been spending a lot of time with Lou's family since her mother died and Kate knew that she felt compelled to join the army now that she was old enough, much to Lou's dismay. She also knew that the girl hesitated not out of fear but because she was reluctant to leave behind her friends and her familiar environment, which made Kate feel sorry for her but it also made her glad that there were still kids around who had something like that.)

And, of course, Jeannie. Who came every time she could. Whenever she returned from one of her short missions outside the vicinity of the base she came to medical first, and Kate had the distinct impression that she didn't come to see her mother. Kate learned all about those missions listening to her daughter tell it to someone else, and Reese, who had a lot more experience in the field despite being not two years older than Jeanette, always had some advice to offer. He also listened to her tales intently and seemed interested in learning from her experiences in case he ever found himself in similar situations, and Kate could see through the wall how much that delighted her daughter.

Kate watched it with a hint of amusement and only very little concern. It actually fit the pattern of Jeannie's crushes since she'd been a little girl. She'd always latched onto the soldier who was the most awesome to her at that given moment, completely regardless of age or gender. Now that she was older Kate wondered if she was differentiating a bit more, but as far as she knew her daughter was still full of aimless admiration for any hero of the hour. Kyle had saved her dad and her beloved little sister, so he was her hero right now. He also was basically the soldier she wanted to be, and he listened to her and took her seriously, so Kate was not surprised that she was all over him.

She wasn't worried about where this was going. Perhaps a little bit worried that her girl would get her heard broken, but then, Jeannie's crushes never ran very deep and it was obvious that she liked Kyle beyond the romantic interest. So Kate felt some motherly concern but was generally mostly amused by their interactions and Kyle complete obliviousness.

The day she released Kyle from medical, she warned John to go easy on him and not take him out on any mission yet no matter how much he insisted he was fine, and then she added, “I think Jeannie has a crush on him,” and John spit his coffee all over his desk.

“What,” he croaked. Kate mostly just stared. She hadn't thought people really did that. It brought back memories of comedies watched in her childhood.

“Well, it's not all that surprising. He's basically- Wait, are you seriously telling me you didn't notice?”

John seemed to become aware of the mess he had made of his papers. From somewhere he produced a tissue and started cleaning up, but he wasn't looking at what he was doing, he was looking at Kate. “No,” he said, but it didn't sound like a reply to her question – more like a denial of the entire situation. “That's not... Hell, no!”

“Oh, come on!” Kate groaned. “You didn't have any issue with it when she was making puppy-dog eyes at a woman three times her age. Now she's falling for a guy her own age you suddenly explode?” Maybe that was the problem, she thought – for the first time it seemed like something might actually come out of Jeannie being on love, on the ground of her crushing on someone who might be interested as well. “If it makes you feel better, I don't think anything will happen,” Kate tried to dissipate John's concerns. “I mean, Kyle wouldn't recognize a flirt if it jumped out of the trenches and shot him in the face.”

John shook himself. Like a dog that got wet. “Yeah, that's what I've heard...” He trailed off. Kate wondered who he had heard that from, and who else had been trying to flirt with the guy only to find they might as well try hitting on a rock. A very flat rock, that all the hits went straight over. Probably more than one person. Seen in the right angle, Kyle was easy on the eyes – as Kate had found out only a few days ago, when he got to shower and untangle his messy hair, and also didn't look so pale, gaunt, and blood shot anymore. Also, he seemed very genuine and kind of sweet, and she could see how that would appeal to people.

He was also so clueless it was hilarious. Which was probably a good thing. Given John's reaction just now, Kate shuddered to think what would have happened if anything were actually going on between those kids.

“I never took you to be the kind of father to flip out when his darling girl starts dating,” she remarked.

“Ah, it's not that.” John still looked shocked., like someone had pulled the floor out from under his feet without warning and then set him on fire. Kate had never seen him like this and it was almost funny but it was also weird because it didn't fit the image she had of him. “I don't mind her dating. I mean, I do, because anyone she would date would probably die and it will break her heart and I wish she'd wait jut a few more years until this whole mess is over, but on principle, that's not it.”

“Oh, so it's Kyle then,” Kate guessed. She felt her amusement dissipate very quickly. “I thought you had gotten over that stupid resentment of yours. Seriously, you took that kid into your own team, you remember that, right? I do hope you're not going to single him out again because of whatever the fuck is wrong with you.”

“Hey,” John protested. Glaring. “Would you mind not jumping to the conclusion that I am a horrible person right off the bat? I'm just worried because, in case you hadn't noticed, the missions my team goes on aren't harmless and I don't want her to get hurt when he inevitably dies. Also, he's clueless, which might get her heart broken, which I don't like thinking about. And, since we're at it, there's the thing where having my daughter's boyfriend on my team would be awkward, and people would talk even more than they already do. So, bad choice for many reasons, none of which have anything to do with him as a person.”

Good reasons, too, although Kate thought that none of them justified him reacting like someone had just tried to shoot him.

None the less, he had successfully managed to make her feel bad for her accusations, and Kate didn't handle feeling bad about herself very well. So she covered it up, like a little kid who had done something wrong and didn't want to deal with it by deflecting. “Whether they become an item or not, Jeannie likes him, and so does Lou, and even Casey. So how about you scratch that first point off your list and try not to get him killed?”

John stood from his chair, frustrated and angry. “That may just not be an option, and you know it!” he snapped, before turning on his heel and leaving the room, slamming the door behind him.

Kate sighed. That had gone well. She was also confused because it seemed like John was overreacting all over the place and that really wasn't like him at all.

Perhaps he was just nervous, she thought. _She_ was. The war had been going so well lately. After years – _decades_ – of feeling like they made no progress at all, they won battle after battle now, gaining ground, getting closer and closer to Skynet and its core. The war seemed winnable now – and soon, even. And so, Kate was more afraid than she had been in years. That they would suffer another blow to throw them back years, but even more so that the war would end soon, but John, or Jeannie, or anyone else she loved would fall just before they got there. Like her father had.

She had forgotten how painful hope could be. But it was there, now, and she wasn't going to let it go.

  


-

  


Being with Connor's unit was significantly different from being with Perry's, Reese found out quickly enough – mainly in that they didn't move around all the time but had a set bunker from where they operated. They were still out a lot, sometimes not seeing their base for weeks, but at least they had some set place to return to and didn't have to carry everything they owned with them at all times. Not that Reese owned enough to have anything to leave behind here. But it was worth a lot to know what to expect when coming home, and who to expect there.

They often moved out for short missions without the General, because the General was needed elsewhere. A lot of the time they were the unit associated with Connor rather than the unit led by Connor, but they still executed his orders, even when he was not with them. Reese had gone out without Perry a lot, too. It wasn't a new situation.

The people he served with were different. Not just in the sense that they were different people, but in the sense that everything _about_ them was different. They differed from his comrades in the 132nd in the way they carried themselves, in the way they interacted, and – most important to Reese – in the way they interacted with _him_. He'd gotten to know some of them during his long stay in medical. More than one had come to thank him for saving their boss, and Estelle Marini had come a few times even, usually in the company of Miranda Jones with whom she appeared to be friends. They were friendly enough, but Reese was well aware that he was an intruder in a unit that that grown close and closed long before he had entered the picture. He was also aware that many did not think he belonged with them, both inside and outside of the team. He was aware of the talk.

The equipment was better. They got newly developed stuff first and they got enough of it. Of Perry's men, only every other would get certain things like night vision goggles or portable radars, because those were essential in many situations but hard to make and hard to replace once lost. They made do by pairing people accordingly so every team had at least one of everything they might need. Of Connor's team, everyone got everything they needed. Even Reese, and that was the moment when he became fully aware that he wasn't just some appendix to tag along while the real members of the team did all the important stuff.

The long, cold tracks across the frozen wasteland were exactly the same as they had always been. The trucks didn't much differ. The weapons were precise and effective, although it often felt like they were not as precise and effective as the machines.

While he officially belonged to Connor's team, Reese was only allowed to accompany the soldiers patrolling around the base at first – the division Jeanette also belonged to, although they were never send out together. Only far into the month of March did he get cleared for longer missions by Kate Brewster, and got to go out into the ruins of L.A. once again.

That, at least, hadn't changed. It was different among these people, but it was the same none the less. Fight the machines. Watch out for machines. Watch each other's backs. The realities of a soldier in the ruins were bloody, but simple.

The first real mission Reese was on went well. They accomplished their objective of destroying a new factory before the machines could even finish erecting it, and aside from a graze and a few minor burns, no one got hurt. Reese was winded after the action was over, more so than he liked to admit, but he admitted it anyway, having learned his lesson on acting strong long ago.

During this mission, and the one after, their team split up. Reese ended up in a group with Connor every time and while he told himself that that was no different than fighting alongside Perry (because it wasn't), it did feel different (because it was). He was aware that Connor probably kept him close to keep an eye on him, since all the others had already earned his trust, but he didn't take it personally. He just did the best he could, and that was apparently good enough. There were some suggestions Connor made afterward, on how he could do better, that he did his best to follow, but he also got some praise out of it. Just a few remarks on how he handled this situation or that, but they seemed to come from a place of genuine appreciation.

Reese was a little overwhelmed by this, not sure how to react, but he was also very relieved. He knew he hadn't earned his place on this team the normal way, had not, in fact, earned it at all. Everyone here was older, more experienced then him. He was glad that he was at least not a disappointment; that Connor wouldn't have trouble justifying his decision to take him.

At the same time he was impressed with the fact that Connor had noticed anything about him at all, with everything that had been going on around them. At all times, the general seemed to be speaking orders into his headset, watching the environment, or firing at something. At some point, he had been crouching behind a construction of pipes, barely out of sight of the H.K. on the other side of it, occasionally peering past it to see what the enemy was doing and completely calm. Reese, sitting on the other side of their little hiding place, had been pretty distracted by the proximity of the machine's fire, yet it hadn't escaped him how completely in control is leader appeared while he listened to his men's reports over the radio and gave his orders, before readying his weapon and leaving his cover for an attack. Reese hadn't even needed any kind of signal to follow. He'd known in that moment that he would follow that man anywhere.

Connor was a legend. And Reese had been impressed with him before. But it was only there, in the sooth of the battlefield, that he fully realized that the man lived up to his legend, even though he was no different than any other commander Reese had ever served with. Or perhaps just because of that. Connor was so important and so powerful, and yet there was no distance there in those moments. Reese felt completely safe with him, knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that this man would not thoughtlessly send him or anyone else to die as cannon fodder just out of convenience. Even though Reese, and anyone else, wouldn't hesitate to go.

The third mission, Connor wasn't with them. Important business kept him at the base where a lot of other missions not involving them had to be coordinated and planned. Their objective this time was not to destroy anything but to scout out an area in West L.A. that had been ignored by the army so far because there was relatively heavy machine presence and relatively little to gain there. That was exactly the reason why they were send out there – Skynet had decidedly too many bots collected in this particular area to not be guarding something, or so the argument was. Observation from the distance had yielded absolutely nothing, so Connor send out his team to check on it. Part of his team, anyway. The others were send to another part of the city, helping some scavs who had requested their support with clearing their territory over the radio.

The original plan had been for the rest of the team to wait in an auxiliary bunker outside of that area, in case they were needed. The others were to go thorough the areal in groups of two, spreading thin to cover as much ground as possible while also minimizing the risk of discovery. If any of them were to run into trouble with the machines, the backup should show up to help them out if needed. But only if absolutely needed. If anything was indeed there, the army didn't want to give away that they had their eye on it, else it would either be moved or Skynet would drop all pretenses of the opposite and just bring up all the defenses, making anything they were guarding nearly unreachable. It had been in discussion, apparently, to send in all in one big group for safety, make it look like they were just passing through, but the idea was dismissed quickly for being too risky and for putting everyone at risk all at once. Another idea had been to have ten soldiers roam the area on their own, without a partner for backup, but that, too had been dismissed for leaving them too vulnerable.

Reese hadn't been there for the discussion. It was something the brass decided, and anyone who had particular experience in the area they were going for, which in this case was basically no one, except a few who had operated nearby. The part of town stretched over three quarters of a mile and all the ruins in it that were still standing appeared to be completely burned out. Connor, Hernandez, and Captain Dalokun of the 260th where the main participants. Reese later heard that Connor had leaned towards the idea of having everyone go on their own but had eventually decided on teams of two as a compromise between stealth and safety.

But there wasn't much safety to be had in the first place. Chances where that before their backup arrived, the machines would be all over them, and even if the backup used long range weapons, it would be hard to do that without hitting their own men. Two men against all the bots in there wouldn't make much difference to one man against all the bots in there, but it would double the risk of being discovered. It would only truly be of advantage if they found something and one needed to keep watch while the other explored it. Or if one died after finding something, so the other could report after making it back to the rest of the team.

On top of that was the fact that Reese didn't know the people from his new team all that well yet and didn't know if he could pull off something like this mission off with most – or any – of them at his site. The others had worked together for years, to the point where any pair could go through that maze with a minimum of communication and operating on blind trust that might just made them get through it, but Reese hadn't. Having learned to trust his instincts, he requested to be allowed to go on his own, feeling that would be best for both him and the potential partner he would have been given.

Connor, while not leading the mission himself, had asked him to explain rather than telling him to suck it up, so Reese had. Another discussion had come up when Reese mentioned that he didn't think the back up would do much good, especially considering this was supposed to be a stealth mission. Old arguments had been revisited and in the end Connor had agreed to send everyone who went into that areal in there on their own, with no backup but a truck driver waiting in that bunker to get them back.

They could move more freely like this, and in the event of discovery it wouldn't make much of a difference. Also, if one of them got discovered on their own, the machines might buy that they were only there because they had gotten lost on the way to somewhere else. If they found one and then suddenly ten others came to that one's aid, Skynet would doubtlessly figure out they were looking for something.

Which was Connor's argument when he went one step further and ordered them not to give themselves away if any of them ran into trouble. It would only ruin the mission and probably bring up the body count. Who got caught was on their own. He told them not to get caught.

Reese was quite happy with this solution. He could move more freely like this, and for a few hours, sneaking through the ruins and looking for anything out of the ordinary while dodging the oblivious machines, he felt more free than he had in a long time. There was the mission to focus on and nothing else. They weren't allowed to use their comm units and had, in fact, nor brought them. It was just him, and the machines; just searching for his objective and trying not to be found himself.

It was Major Ava Jan, their team's leader, who found the entrance in the end. Somewhere, on the ground level on a half-collapsed building blackened by smoke, she found a long, narrow slope running down into an extensive basement, and in that basement more machines, and no cover. Having no choice but to retreat she did so, but what she had been seeing in there was enough to tell that that place was important. Lots of control pads, she reported after meeting the others at the appointed time and place. Lots of humming electricity and monitors and colorful, flickering lights.

Definitely important, if the machines made an effort to actually hide its presence. At some point during the ride back to the base, Captain Hannes told a story of one of his first misadventures with command when he'd been a sergeant in the 53rd, back in 2011, and the thought occurred to Reese how much things had changed since early days of the war. How back then, the army was hiding everywhere, striking from secret bases and trying to camouflage all of their activities because if the machines discovered what they were doing they would prevent it by sheer numbers, plain and simple. Now it were the machines that were hiding their bases and important stations for the risk of the army destroying them if they were discovered. The army was no longer hopeless opponent to a seemingly invincible foe; they were feared. They were being taken seriously as a risk.

That was another thing Connor had done, along with the countless men and women who had fought by his side even when everything had seemed pointless; when it must have felt like they could only postpone the inevitable. During their talks Reese had gotten enough of an impression to think that this, too, might have been Connor's mother's influence: this inability to give up even when everything seemed lost. Sarah Connor had fought the inevitable as well, all alone, and while she had not been able to stop it, she had never stopped trying, and Reese would forever admire her for that and let it be an inspiration on the days when going on seemed so hard. Perhaps Sarah would have made it, if she hadn't been on her own. She must have known her task of stopping the war was doomed to fail and yet she never despaired over it and gave up but instead prepared her son for what came after. Sometimes he wondered if even those people who passed the time by telling stories about this woman knew just how much humanity actually owed her.

When Tyson, a freshly-promoted captain, asked him what he was thinking about, he explained as well as he could without going into details he didn't want to share. He needn't have worried – as soon as he pointed out that Skynet now obviously feared them, everyone else picked up on that and the back of the truck was too busy cheering about that to follow any other train of thought. Even Reese couldn't help but grin when Tyson clapped him on the back and everyone around them basked in the knowledge that victory might actually be at hand.

It was still a long way to that point. It wasn't guaranteed and even if it happened, not all of them might see it. But no one thought about that in this moment. Reese did, but then he allowed himself not to for a while.

It wasn't even anything special that caused it, but he felt somewhat more accepted into the group after that – mostly evident by the way they were teasing him now, just like they were teasing each other. It was a different teasing than he was used to, though, and he felt the distance grow again every time he didn't quite know how to react, or missed a point. Too much of it was referencing to things that even now, after years out of the camp, were outside his frame of reference.

“So, are you interested in spending some alone time once we get back to base,” Sergeant Stevens asked him just after they crossed the line into secured territory, “or do you have other plans?” She winked at him, sliding an arm around his shoulders in a way he didn't want to show was making him uncomfortable while he stared at her trying to figure out what she was talking about.

“And by 'alone time' she means her bunk in the sleeping hall while everyone else pretends not to stare,” Tyson clarified. Everyone laughed and then laughed harder when Reese finally caught on to what they were talking about, still couldn't quite make sense of it, and asked, “What?”

“Don't worry, I'd expect everyone else to be a gentleman about it and bugger off for the duration,” Stevens assured him. “Unless there's any lady or guy you'd like to join in?” She waggled her eyebrows and everyone laughed again. “I volunteer,” a male voice shouted over the laughter, but Reese was too busy trying to figure out a way out of this that didn't involve jumping off the truck to identify the speaker.

“I'd rather not,” he finally said, hoping it would make everyone else stop paying attention to him. He didn't have a lot of hope, and no cause for it. Stevens misunderstood his meaning, possibly on purpose, and pulled him even closer.

“So, just us, then,” she cooed.

Reese was aware she was just teasing him; he'd seen it before, both here and with the 132nd, and knew that he should now get out of this with a flippant remark or a joke, But he'd never been the target of it before, he didn't like it and just wanted it to be over, and all he came up with was “No.”

Stevens pulled back, making a face. “So cruel! I have never been rejected this harshly before!”

“You're losing our touch, Lorry,” Lieutenant Will Schneider pointed out from his place at the end of the bench, without looking up from the gun he was cleaning.

“Aw, he's just shy,” Stevens argued.

“I think he wants to be left alone,” Ava Jan quipped in. She sounded stern, but when Reese looked at her, her lips were twitching. None the less, she said, “Take it elsewhere, Lorna. I'm sure if he wants to take you up on the offer, he'll know where to find you.”

Stevens snorted, but backed off as she had been told. Reese threw Major Jan a grateful glance, but she waved it off with something like pity on her face. Soon enough he realized that he wasn't off the hook. Everyone now seemed to make it their life's purpose to come on to him as a joke and then laugh at his lack of interest. At least he got a lot better at dealing with it in the next two days. No one meant anything by it, and knowing that helped, but more often than not he still wished they would leave him alone.

It wasn't that he was blind to the sex that sometimes happened in the barracks even if they were full, or that he had any particular issue with it. He just didn't care about going at it himself, and it annoyed him that everyone else seemed to think he should. Truth be told, he wasn't quite sure where they got the energy, let alone a partner who had the energy as well. Every mission he was on drained him – even worse now than it had been before his injury – and when he was back at their base he was busy preparing fixing damage to his equipment or preparing for the next mission. Everything about him was focused on fighting and survival; his world left little room for anything else. If there was any time at all, he'd use it to rest. There was barely even time for something he actually _wanted_ to do, like read a book, or have Louisa tell him more about history.

He was in the middle of testing a new gun for the weapon's department, one that aimed to imitate the machines' plasma-fire technology, when Connor became witness to the team's teasing for the first time. Tyson slapped his ass walking past him in a way that reminded him of Wilkins and that he had seen coming, so there was never any risk of him accidentally shooting someone, and Jan made a remark on how this world was like a horror movie and Reese did well to preserve his virginity because everyone knew that losing your virginity in a horror movie was an instant ticket to murder. He blinded them out after that and didn't think anything of it until he noticed Connor looking at him with an unreadable expression on his face.

“Sir?” he asked, not sure what this was about. The general, who had been watching the weapon's test, frowned, and waved him off. A moment later he looked at Reese again and asked him to come see him in his office later.

That was a first. And whatever the reason, it probably wasn't anything good.

Connor generally didn't ask people to come see him unless it was about a mission or there was something that absolutely needed to be addressed. There was no mission coming up – at least none that Reese had any kind of special part in – and so the only reason for this could be that something was so wrong that Connor felt he had to take care of it himself.

He mentally went through the events of the past few days, including the latest mission, and found nothing worthy of mention. Which meant that if he had indeed done something wrong, he wasn't even aware of it and it would be a good thing to have it pointed out to him. Or it was something else altogether. That way of thinking did nothing to make him feel less nervous, but then he pushed the thought aside and concentrated on hitting targets with powerful plasma fire.

They exploded. Everyone was quite satisfied.


	29. 2027 - 2/3

Connor had not given a time for Reese to see him, so he finished what he was scheduled to do that day and went to the office at the command center afterward, to see if the General was in and free. He was. Reese stepped through the open doorway and thought how amazing it was that there was a room this large and empty in a bunker like this.

The room wasn't that large, but it was bigger than it needed to be and dominated by a desk that took up barely a fifth of its total size. It wasn't that empty; the shelves lining it were cluttered with papers and books and maps, and small tables and chairs were cluttered with more papers and maps and disks and loose pieces of equipment, but none of that breathed, and that made it feel like free space compared to the main halls where it sometimes seemed like everyone on the planet was fighting for enough room to stretch out their legs.

The room was lit only by the desk lamp and the light falling in through the doorway, which made it seem smaller, but Reese still got a sense of space around himself as he walked towards the desk. He had never been here before, and it took effort not to look around to take in everything he could. Out of curiosity, but also because every instinct in him screamed to get to know the environment. Find another exit, just in case.

He lost the battle in the end and had a quick look around, just to get the lay of the place. There was no other exit and his back was to the only door. It wasn't something he would have tolerated if not for the fact that Connor, who he trusted, was looking right at that opening.

Connor was also looking right at him, and he didn't look angry, so Reese let go of some of the tension in his body. “You wanted to see me, Sir?” he asked.

Connor, who had been fiddling with a small piece of paper in his hand, put it down and nodded. Reese caught a glimpse of it; it seemed to be a photo. Then he looked at Connor again.

And then he learned that the reason for this conversation was not at all what he'd expected. The General had overheard the other soldiers teasing him. He wanted to know if everything was alright and if there was any trouble between him and the other members of their team. The angle was so unexpected that Reese needed a moment to wrap his mind around the question and how to bring it into a context that made sense.

“Everything is alright, Sir,” he promised. “If there was anything going on that would influence our performance in the field, I would let you know.”

Connor gave him a strange, blank look. “That's not actually what I asked. I want to know if they are bothering you. I know they can be a little overwhelming.”

“I got used it it, Sir. I believe they are simply getting amusement out of the fact that I am not interested in sleeping with any of them.”

“I see,” Connor said. “So they keep hitting on you?”

“Not much, Sir. And not seriously. I suppose they would be surprised if I ever took any of them up on their offer.” That would probably make them leave him alone, too. Something to think about. Chances were he wouldn't even have to go through with it. Then again, if he had to and didn't, everything would probably get worse.

“You planning to?” Connor asked with the hint of a smile on his face.

“No, Sir.” Reese thought for a moment; the question had been unexpected as well. “I didn't give it any thought, but no, I don't see that happening.”

“Well, you never know what the future will bring,” Connor mused. “If nothing else, you might want to have children one day.”

Reese shuddered involuntarily at the thought. “I don't.”

“Oh?” Connor still had that slight smile on his face. It seemed to be frozen there. “You sound very sure of that.”

“I am, Sir.” Reese hadn't really thought about that either, but he knew this to be true. “I wouldn't know how to raise a child in this world. I wouldn't be much of a father.”

“A lot of fathers around here have very little to do with the raising of their children,” Connor said. He was looking at Reese strangely, in a way that made him uncomfortable because it make him feel like he was mission something obvious. “That doesn't have to be much of a factor.”

“Hm.” Reese fought the impulse to rub the back of his neck, standing straight instead. He hadn't expected the conversation to go this way, but then, conversations tended to develop into unexpected directions. He just wasn't good at them. For lack of experience with what people wanted to actually hear, he went with the truth most of the time, as he did now, even though it was probably much more information that Connor actually cared about. “If I ever had children I would want to be there for them. I wouldn't want to just create them and then leave them alone, even if they had others to take care of them. And I wouldn't be able to do that. I'm always out there fighting, and chances are I'd get killed long before they were grown up enough to care for themselves.”

There was a long pause before Connor snorted softly. “I see you've given that some thought.”

“I haven't,” Reese admitted. “I just know how it is.”

“Well, with luck the war will be over soon. Ever thought about what to do then?”

When he had come in, Connor had gestured for Reese to sit on the polished metal chair on the other side of the desk, which Reese had declined because if he was to be chewed out, he would rather take that standing up. Now he sat. “I don't know,” he admitted. “I don't know anything else.” He didn't say that he couldn't wait for this war to be over, but in a way also dreaded it because he didn't know what he would be without it. That he imagined he wouldn't be anything.

“Well, there will be a lot to do then,” Connor pointed out. “This world won't rebuild itself. We'll all be old men by the time anyone can think about setting down.”

That was true. Reese didn't know what they would rebuild this world into, but he would love to see it, and be a part of something that didn't have to do with destruction. Yeah. He still couldn't see it, but he would love to find out.

Connor looked thoughtful, but he wasn't looking at Reese anymore. He was looking at the photo in front of him and Reese allowed himself to look at it, too, for a second. “Is that your mother?” he found himself asking a moment later.

Connor nodded wordlessly, picked up the picture, and handed it to Reese for closer inspection. It was a Polaroid, the sturdy material without tear, but numerous stains and faded colors betrayed its age. Everything was the color of sand and earth – only the sky in the background had retained a hint of blue.

Sarah Connor had been wearing a headband when the picture was taken, and she was looking into the distance, not into the camera, like she didn't know she was at the focus of anyone's attention. Her hair was unruly, windblown – she appeared to be sitting in a topless car, much like the one Wilkins had died in. At her side a dog, much like the ones they used here to watch for terminators. Her face was unlike anything to be found here: clean, unblemished. But the sadness in her eyes, the wistful longing with which she looked at the horizon, that was something Kyle knew all too well; like there was no distance between them at all.

“She looks,” beautiful, he thought, and didn't say. Too intimate, and inadequate. The word described, but could never convey, how she looked like the world she came from; how Reese looked at her likeness captured on Polaroid and saw the innocence and the potential of the past, now both lost. Something so great, and so important, that was gone. “young,” he finished.

“She was,” Connor confirmed. “That was long before the war. She wasn't that much older than you at that point.”

“She looks sad,” Reese noted. “What is she thinking about?”

“I don't know. I wasn't there. My dad probably. He died around that time.”

The answer was almost surprising. With Sarah Connor being the legend that she was, it was easy to forget that their leader must have had a father as well. “I'm sorry,” Reese said.

“Yeah.” Connor's eyes looked like his mother's in the picture: gazing at something far away. “Me, too.”

Reese wanted to ask more, but anything from here out would be too personal. He handed the photo back.

  


-

  


_'Keep it,'_ John wanted to say, but he just took the little piece of stained paper back and held it between his fingers where he had held it so many times before. He wasn't ready to let this go yet.

He wasn't ready for a lot of things. What was he doing, having this conversation? Asking a man he knew would never see it what was wanted to do after the war. What had he been hoping to hear? _'I can't imagine my life without blowing up things, I hope something kills me before this is over'_? Because that would have been the only reply to at least not make him feel worse.

“When my mother was still around,” he said, since apparently he hated himself and couldn't stop, “she invested a lot of time into making me appreciate the value of human life. Now look at this.” He made a vague gesture to indicate that “this” was outside the scope of this room. “I never counted, but I'm sure by this point I have send more people to their death than I have saved.”

And he was also sinking into self-pity in front of one of the people he was going to get killed.

Reese frowned. John couldn't see it, but he heard it in his voice when he said, “Sir, without you there wouldn't be _anyone_ left.”

“But how did I do that? By sending out others to their doom. Often enough I know the people I send out on this mission or that won't come back. I know it, and I do it anyway. I wonder sometimes if I'm any better than the machines, where everything come down to calculation.”

“Don't say that,” Reese snapped. Well, maybe snapped was too strong a word. But his voice was a bit harsher than John had ever heard it. “Are you saying all we've accomplished thanks to you doesn't matter?”

“You give me too much credit. That's not just thanks to me. That's thanks to a lot of people making sacrifices and me sacrificing them at the right moment.”

“Exactly.”

John looked up at the admission. He wasn't asking the young soldier to stroke his ego here, and could understand every bit of blame for lost comrades that was thrown his way, but he hadn't expected Reese to be this blunt, either – mostly because few people ever were, with him. But beyond that, the tone of voice didn't fit. There was no anger in it, and when John looked Reese in the eye, Reese looked back unblinking. “Everyone knows what you have done for us and how much we need you, so there's no one in the army who wouldn't die for you anyway,” he said, with an air of total conviction. “But more than that, we all know that sacrifices have to be made. And we trust you, Sir. We know that you wouldn't send any of us to our death if it wasn't absolutely necessary. So we know, when it happens, that our death, and that of the others, serves a purpose, and it's a price we're all willing to pay.”

John thought that there were some soldiers who were _definitely_ getting too much credit here, but he also knew that those weren't many, and that was not the reason why he had to avert his face for a moment.

He left the office half an hour after the end of their conversation, feeling like he had been granted something that he didn't deserve. There was no one he could talk to about it. Sitting in silence, separated from the rest of the world by secrets he couldn't share had long since become a part of who he was.

There was not much time to sit in silence. There never was. There were missions to be planned and one of them needed the support of the troop Jeanette was part of. John tried to blind out the fact that his daughter was involved when he discussed the best tactic with her Captain and Hernandez. He couldn't let his personal feelings compromise the way he planned this and possibly create weak spots that didn't need to be there out of his desire to keep her safe. He couldn't keep leading these people if he did that.

So he blinded it out and planned the mission the way he would have if Jeannie had nothing to do with, and in the end he created a situation in which the chances of her getting hurt or killed were considerably higher than during her usual assignments and he knew he had done well.

He'd spend the past several years sending Reese on missions that could get him killed, despite his importance and all the things he owed him, so John had practice in putting his feelings aside. And the world wouldn't even be in danger if Jeanette died. Not from temporal paradox, anyway.

Of course, Reese was (possibly) protected by the fact that he would have to die at a later point and for most of his life he'd been just a name to John. Jeannie was his daughter and he didn't know what he, or Kate, or Lou would do if anything happened to her, but all he could do now was accept that maybe they would have to find out.

John didn't have a lot of time to worry about it, and for that he was glad. A team of scouts had reported that the machines had taken back a part of the city that the army often passed through as a shortcut to more interesting areas, and he decided to take care of that with his own team, much to the surprise of everyone – including his own team. This was a routine mission that anyone could do, and John's small division usually dealt with more challenging things. Like blowing up factories, taking over heavily guarded stations, looking for hidden bases or defending settlements that were under attack. Right now, everyone was eager to check and then take out that hidden base they had discovered not too long ago. This mission seemed like an unnecessary delay.

John didn't offer any explanation. He did have a reason for his decision, though, and that reason went beyond having something to take his mind off the danger his daughter might be in. That was just a bonus.

They left the next day, just before sunset. The sky was gray and closed, as if it had never shown them the stars at all. As if the stars didn't exists. John wondered if Kyle had seen them at some point or if he had missed that. Having the opportunity to do so, he asked him, and the answer was no. The night when John and Lou had seen them just before the attack, Kyle's attention had been on the terminators they were following. And after that night he hadn't seen the sky for months, although John could tell him that gabs in the clouds were still amazingly scarce, and so he probably hadn't missed anything anyway.

Kyle seemed a little upset about the missed chance to see the stars anyway, through he tried not to show it, and if he was honest with himself, so was John. He tried to console himself that there was still plenty of time for them to make an appearance when Kyle happened to be looking up, but there was no guarantee for that. And there was no guarantee that he would see them in 1984, because the sky over L.A. wasn't exactly clear, and his attention would have to be elsewhere.

It was silly and changed nothing, but John wanted him to have this.

Their mission took them but half a night out from their base. Visibility was good enough, with the snow on the ground and the even cover of clouds. There was no wind and no snow except for the very occasional flake falling before their eyes, nearly invisible in front of the snow on the ground. Good travel conditions. Good conditions for a fight.

The machines had already started to convert the road to their needs. There weren't a lot of them visible from a distance, but they all knew there were plenty. And there would be more if they got the chance to call for reinforcements.

John and his men didn't allow that to happen. They worked swiftly and effectively, taking out all of the machines in the first areal in a matter of two minutes. There were more, though, behind a row of ruins dominated by a half-collapsed skyscraper leaning precariously into another building. They came over, attracted by the fighting. Five of them: three small and swift, two large and powerful. No H.K.s, though. No flying ones. They were no challenge.

An explosion shook the ruined skyscraper and a large chunk of rubble fell down and smashed one of the two larger enemies while John and Reese were fighting the centipede-like bot that kept trying to circle them. John saw it out of the corner of his eye. Neither he nor Reese so much as jumped at the noise of the impact.

All he needed to know he learned through his comm unit before the fight was over: no one had been hit, though for Ava it had been a close thing. The centipede exploded moments later. It wasn't the last machine to occupy this area. There was one last areal, and of the four machines in it, only one had come closer to aid the ones being destroyed by the army. The other three lingered where they were as if waiting for something. Hernandez made short work of the one coming for them, and then John told everyone else to stay back and leave the three last ones alone for now.

He made most of them lie in wait and just watch as he neared the enemies with only Reese, Ava, and Marini for company. Everyone was visibly tense – those bots weren't much of a challenge but they weren't acting the usual way, so no one knew what they were walking into. John made his small team stay crouched behind cover, and while he knew that in theory there was no danger to him either, he crouched as well, out of habit and because it would ruin his demonstration if something went wrong and those things shot him. “Reese,” he said. “A few years ago you were touring the ring around L.A. with the 132nd, sabotaging power stations.”

Reese nodded. John sort of waited for his face to show realization as it dawned on him what was going on, but what he saw was more like careful expectation. As if he had already figured it out by himself and was just waiting for John to confirm it, which was probably exactly what had happened. Of course. The man was not an idiot, and he had been there when the stations were manipulated and probably knew in what way. John now turned to the others to inform an audience that was still lacking crucial information.

“One of the objectives of that mission was manipulating a few of Skynet's stations so that they still charnged the machines docking there and still put in new orders, but to change those orders to our advantage. For starters, we have chosen subtle changes that won't immediately give away what's going on, so we can use the same trick later again on a bigger scale. One of the stations for example programmed aerial H.K.s so that they would draw a counter-clockwise circle in the sky before attacking any soldier they saw. Another programmed the machines to stop fighting as soon as there were only three of them left.”

“So that's working, then,” Ava observed. Her eyes were gleaming. “That's... Well, that's awesome, boss!”

“How does Skynet not notice this?” Marini wondered. “Won't it ruin everything if Big Bad realizes we are here – _you_ are here – and the bots are just standing there?”

“Skynet won't notice, because we programmed the bots not to tell it. There are hundreds of thousands of machines out there at any given moment and Skynet is coordinating all of them through programs and sub-programs. These three won't raise a flag because they aren't aware there's an irregularity and so Skynet won't, either. But even if they did, chances are the information would get lost in the overload.”

“Chances are?” Ava repeated. “Chances are really not something we should take here. What if Skynet happens to have a closer look just now?”

“You're right,” John agreed, and all four of them readied their weapons and blew up the machines that never resisted once. When they were done, Marini was grinning. It was an unfamiliar expression on her face.

“This is great!” she declared. “We need to tell everyone! From now on fighting will be so much easier. If–“

“It's not quite that simple,” John interrupted her. “So far we have only gotten a few machines that happened to have visited that particular station in the past. Perry's division has kept an eye on the movement of this one group so we could test our plan, but this truly is little more than a test run. We'd need to sabotage much more stations like that to reach a lot more machines, and then we would have to do it in a way that really counts for something. Make them attack each other is a personal favorite idea, but once they do that, Skynet will know what is going on. We have one shot at this, and we have to make it count. This isn't going to make the war any easier until we know how exactly to use the opportunity this will give us.”

There was a bit of silence after that, even though the news couldn't have been a surprise for anyone. It was just easy to get carried away by such good news, and when the end of the long war was finally in sight, every delay seemed to be unbearable. John understood that.

They returned to the others who were waiting for them and who knew what was going on because Hernandez had filled them in in the meantime. Then they got back to their vehicle and informed the base that the experiment with the sabotage was a full success. On the drive back, John's mind was already going through the possibilities. They had an opportunity now, and needed a good plan to use it for.

He was driving the truck, because he liked driving the truck and he didn't often get the chance. John had learned how to drive when he was ten or eleven, because his mom thought that was a useful skill to have should he ever need to get away quickly without her being there for him to do the driving. He'd actually learned how to hot wire a car when he was eight. He didn't think his mother had a particular plan for when she would teach him what – it had just kind of come up along with lock picking.

Those were all pretty cool skills to learn. Young John had been excited about it – the lock piking and hot wiring part happened in a time when it still kind of felt like a game to him. Not that his mom had left any doubt about how serious he was to take this, and the haunted determination she had displayed in anything she did had really driven home the point, but back then he'd still been convinced that she would take care of everything before he ever had to become a hero and had been able to enjoy some of it.

Once he knew how to start a car, he had been eager to drive one, too. Mom had been a bit more hesitant to teach him that, although looking back he wasn't sure if she was more worried about him getting hurt or about him being an idiot who stole a car and drove it around where responsible adults could see him and call the police. Both were equally likely. If she'd been trying to be a responsible parent who didn't let their kid with a one-digit age drive a jeep, she'd given up on that notion once the one-digit age was behind him.

John had been an impatient pupil when it came to driving, but he had enjoyed the lessons all the same – even if he ignored all her calls to caution the moment he was alone in a car and the adrenaline rush got the better of him. His father had been a good driver, too, Mom had told him – even though he had driven like someone who didn't know what a stop sign was for, or traffic lights. Or, for that matter, breaks.

The truck rumpled over an obstacle in the road without slowing down. They were still two hours from the base and would have to walk the last few miles. John threw a brief glance at Marini sitting beside him, to see if she was awake. “What's your assessment of Reese?” he asked. “You've gone on more missions with him than I have, now.”

She was silent for a while, obviously thinking about what to say, and John wondered if that was a good or a bad thing. “He's a good soldier,” she finally said. “Level headed, focused. Pretty unfazed by anything the bots are throwing at us. I know there's been talk, especially with all those rumors about you, but so far there nothing on the battlefield has left room to doubt your decision to take him in on the team.”

What rumors? She said that as if she expected him to know, but John had no idea. It probably had something to do with the fact that they saved Reese's life when they shouldn't have.

Something else caught his attention before he could ask. “On the battlefield?” he repeated. “And off it? How does he get along with the others?”

“Okay, I think. I didn't see any major problems.” And she'd probably paid attention to it. There was a reason why John had asked her of all people. “He's not much a part of the group outside of missions, but I don't think that's going to be an issue.”

“I heard the others tease him about something the other day. Does that happen a lot?”

“No more than with others, and he can take it. And most people like him well enough. It's just hard to really get to know him, since he's mostly minding his own business. I don't mind, but I think a few of the others feel a bit rejected when he doesn't react the way they think he should. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure he knows how he's supposed to deal with us, so he just does his own thing.”

“So there are no actual issues in your free time?”

“No. It's not like we have a lot of that anyway.”

That was a good point. And it didn't matter much. Kyle was socially awkward, as John had known he would be before he was even born, and if he was happier keeping to himself, so be it. For some reason, he would still have felt better knowing Kyle was fully accepted into the group and had some friends here. John had always been proud of his team and how well everyone got along. He wanted Kyle to be a part of that.

His thoughts wandered to Jeannie and he wondered how her mission was going. There'd be an update on that once he was back at the base, but the mission and the danger wouldn't be over for days. Kate was probably worried as well, but she wouldn't show it.

And even if Jeannie made it through this mission without harm, there would be more after it. Being worried about her was something her family would have to get used to.

For the first time he wondered if his kids had ever been worried about him when he was on missions. They had always been excited to see him after long absences, especially when they were smaller, but he never had gotten the impression that they'd actually feared for him. Perhaps he had been projecting, because when he was small, he couldn't imagine anything happening to his mother, whom he'd believed to be invincible. Or maybe it was because he had seen himself as invincible in a way, since he knew he wasn't supposed to die anytime soon. It didn't really matter, because thinking that his girls worried about him wouldn't have changed anything. It just would have made him feel bad.

Did Casey worry? It was hard to tell. Casey was quiet and never seemed particularly happy, and John didn't know him as well as he wished he did. There had just never been enough time to really get to know him.

John was, he realized, exactly the kind of dad Kyle didn't want to be.

And now he had hours of driving to think about that. And while he did, and it didn't make him happy, he also knew there was nothing he could do about it and it wouldn't change until the war was over. The only thing he could have done to not be the kind of father who was never there was not having children.

They switched drivers an hour later. Marini took over and John took shotgun and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep. Then he gave up and pulled out the map from the inside of the door, marveling over it. He wished Hernandez was in the cabin with them so they could discuss strategy. John's thoughts left his family and started circling about the sabotage of the machines and how best to do it and when. And that was where his thoughts needed to be.

  


-

  


Jeannette's mission seemed to be going well. However, there was still a long way to go and the dangerous part hadn't started yet. John tried not to obsess over it. He only got some quick information from communications before he called a meeting and reported on the details of their own mission and the behavior of the machines to the rest of the brass, along with Ava. The discussion started immediately after. The discussion would go on for a long time, and a part of John thought how pointless it was even as he participated. Most likely, the final decision would be based on information they didn't even have yet.

It was more than a day after he had returned from his mission that he was able to get away, and by then they had received word that Jeannie's mission had reached its first critical point and moved past it without any problems whatsoever. John felt decidedly better when he finally walked towards the living quarters, but he also felt decidedly tired, sweaty and disgusting.

A short stop at the washrooms later he only felt tired, and very appreciative of the fact that he could sleep in his own bed for once. He didn't know what time it was, had lost track of the hours at some point in the middle of yet another debate, and so he was surprised when he opened the door to his bedroom and found Kate already there.

She wasn't asleep, but she was ready for it. John glanced around but saw neither Lou nor Casey anywhere near. Then he glanced at the clock and saw that it was nearly midnight and the kids would be out in school or doing whatever they did about the bunker. “I pulled three shifts in a row,” Kate explained. “I think I deserve an early break. Did you hear from Jeannie?”

“Yes,” John said. “The mission seems to be going well.”

Kate's face lit up. “That's fantastic. I think I might actually be able to sleep tonight.” The smile lingered, but underneath it she looked very tired. “How was your mission? I didn't see you come in.”

“No, I had a conference afterward that dragged on. But the mission when well. It was just routine, really.” He thought about telling her about the implications of this mission, but was too tired right now, and so looked she. It was a pity, really. It wasn't often that they were alone in here at the same time, without the kids.

John glanced at the clock again. He had a mission briefing with Commander Erics in seven hours. Life wasn't fair.

With a sigh, he let himself drop backwards onto the mattress, stretching out his arms. Taking up an impressive amount of space. If Kate wanted to have some for herself, she'd have to move him.

What she did was poke his face. John felt her fingertips trail down his cheeks, the feeling dulled and then intensified where she ran across scars. He hadn't saved in days. Kate used that to her advantage by running her fingers from his jaw towards his cheekbone until he protested.

“Oh, good. You're alive,” she observed.

“Not much longer if you keep this up.”

“Now I know that wherever you have spend the thirty hours since coming back, it wasn't in the bath,” she teased. “And probably not with some secret lover as well.”

John blinked open his eyes. “Where does that come from?” he wondered.

“Oh, you know. People talk.” Kate seemed entirely unconcerned by the talk of the people. “I met Kyle earlier,” she went on. “He'd been asking for news about Jeannie's mission. I'm wondering if I should tell her or if that would get her hopes up too much.”

“Do tell her,” John said. “Nothing's going to happen there, but it's nice to know someone cares about you enough to make sure you're not dead yet.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. She poked his face again. “That's unexpected. I thought you'd have an odd and inexplicable panic attack at the thought of them together again.”

“Give me some credit. Besides, I've spend some time with Reese, and I think you're right when you say he doesn't know what flirting is supposed to be good for.”

“So you're little girl's honor is safe,” Kate teased. “I was wondering if you're going to have that fit every time she's interested in someone from now on or if that was just Kyle.”

“I guess we'll find out once she's moved on,” John mumbled, letting his eyes fall closed again. He did know the answer, of course, but that was not something he could share with Kate yet. If she thought that he was one of those overprotective dads who thought no man was good enough for their little girl, so be it.

“Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if you spit another drink in favor of the next guy. Or girl,” Kate mused. “In public. So everyone can see that it's about Jeannie and not about Kyle.”

As far as John knew, no one but him and Kate even knew about this reaction to Jeanette's crush. “Why? Are people having any issues with Kyle?” He opened his eyes again and sat up, suddenly not as tired anymore. Maybe there were problems after all that Marini hadn't told him about or had missed. In that case–

“No, but anything else would give credibility to the rumors that he's your illegitimate son from some long ago affair.”

It was good that John wasn't drinking anything this moment, or there would have been a repeat of the drink-spitting incident. “What,” he said.

“Well, it makes sense, right?” Kate didn't sound, or look, like she thought that Kyle might be John's illegitimate son from a long ago affair. She looked like she thought the whole things was hilarious. “The age difference works, and you've spend so much time with him even before he joined your team-”

“I did not,” John protested. He'd barely been with Kyle at all. In fact, he'd felt guilty about how little time he had to spare and for the reasons why.

“You did, actually, once enough people told you you were an ass for avoiding him. I was impressed. I mean, everyone knows you care about your men, but you so rarely share private moments with them, people notice when you actually do. And when you do it more than once and the guy you do it with if young and kind of looks like you, they jump to conclusions.”

“He looks nothing like me.”

“No, he doesn't. Except he sort of does, when the light in right and you wear a hat and no one can see yours faces. Or so I've been told.”

People had actually confused them, from behind, once or twice. They were the same size. That was all.

“And then there is that thing were you insisted on saving him when he was so badly hurt, even though you didn't know him back then.”

“Well, he had just saved my daughter. Did they take that into consideration?”

“And then you were so against him being with your other daughter,” Kate pointed out.

“I wonder where they got that from,” John said sourly. “Considering no one but you was there.”

Kate waved him off. “I didn't say anything. I think they just made that up because it fit the story, and it just happened to be absolutely true.”

John narrowed his eyes at her. “So do _you_ think he's my illegitimate son from a long ago affair?” he asked suspiciously.

Kate laughed. “Don't be stupid. I know you. An affair would have been way too exhausting.”

John pulled a face. “And here I was hoping you'd just know that I would never cheat on you.”

“That, too. But really. An affair? You need to have sex to make babies, and there's just never enough time for that even with your wife. Where would you fit a lover in there?”

John wondered if he had just been insulted in his manliness. It was true, of course. Here they were, alone, in bed, and too tired to do anything with it. “I'll have you know that my father has only had sex once in his life,” he informed his wife with as much dignity as he could muster.

Kate kissed his nose. “Talk about a one hundred percent success rate,” she said. Then she flopped down and spread out her arms. “This bed is mine now, you cheating bastard.”

John flopped onto her. “I thought you didn't buy that?”

“I'm not talking about another woman, I'm talking about bed-theft.”

“If you don't move over, I'll just stay on top of you.”

“Not if I do this.” Kate poked his sides. John jumped, but made an effort not to give her any room. This continued for a while, until eventually they calmed down and fell asleep, in a heap on top of the covers.


	30. 2027 - 3/3

Reese's foot hurt. It wasn't so bad anymore, and he was hardly slower than usual, but the healing injury made him walk with a notable limp that he tried to hide. He wasn't even aware that he did for a minute or so; only when the effort of walking normally made the pain worse with every step did he become aware of what he was doing.

Many people had suffered injuries that gave them an uneven gait. The limp didn't make Reese stand out much even among the civilians surrounding him, but even so, it drew more attention that he liked. Everyone seemed to be staring at him and he didn't like it. Much of it, he was sure, was his imagination, but just as much evidently wasn't. He heard some people talk in hushed voices, and while he couldn't make out their words, he knew it was about him. Why, he did not know. He acted as if he didn't notice. But he didn't like it. He didn't like being here. He felt exposed and vulnerable, and with his hurting foot he couldn't even run very fast.

In a way it reminded him of the camp. The feeling was almost the same. Except there he could have hidden. He'd known where, and everyone knew why. No explanations needed, and here there were no explanations. Here, he was supposed to feel safe.

He knew nothing would actually happen to him. It didn't make him feel any better until he had crossed the hall and was far away from it.

Reese had been stationed in this base for nearly a year now, but outside of the barracks, it still didn't feel like a place he could trust.

He wasn't on his way to the barracks now. He was on his way to medical, for the first time voluntarily. His foot had nothing to do with it. A friend of his had gotten hurt and he wanted to check on her.

Giselle was the doctor on duty when he came in. He greeted her with a nod and she greeted back and told him that Jeanette was in the other room, the one he knew far better than he wished he did. She was even, as it turned out, occupying the same bed, her bright red hair a stark contrast to the washed out gray sheets.

Jeanette was awake and doing nothing in particular. There was a book lying on the bed beside her but she was ignoring it in favor of staring at the ceiling. Reese took in the lines around her mouth speaking of pain, and the lines around her eyes speaking of frustration. Her face lit up when he came in.

“Hey,” she greeted him. “My first visitor who isn't related to me! Please tell me you got plenty of time, because I am dying of boredom here.”

“That would be counter-productive,” Reese observed.

Jeanette's lips twitched. “I keep telling them. Locking me in here for my health serves no purpose if being here kills me, but they won't listen.”

“How long are they gonna keep you?”

Jeanette had just come back this morning, on the first day of November, the first break in the heavy snow fall that had been going on for a week. This had been her third mission outside the relatively safe parameters around the base and the first one that had her gotten hurt. Her injuries weren't so grave that the troop had to fight its way through harsh weather conditions just to get her help in time, but the delay due to waiting out the weather hadn't done her any good, either.

“Just one night, I hope. I'm going stir crazy already. No idea why they are keeping me here in the first place.”

“Because you lost a lot of blood and bumped your head, and if we let you go and you fall over and break your neck, that would be an unworthy end for a brave soldier like you,” Giselle said loudly from the other room.

“Hey!” Jeanette called back. “This is a private conversation!” She then winched, because raising her voice hurt her head.

“There is no privacy here, young lady,” Giselle informed her. Jeanette pulled a face at Reese and lifted her hand to show it to him.

“I lost my pinky and half of my ring finger,” she told him. He could see from the way the bandages wrapped around her hand that she had. “Pretty cool, huh? Now I finally look like the brave soldier that I am.” She stared at her hand while she was talking, and tried to move what was left of her fingers, flinching in pain when she did so.

“I once knew a guy who had lost part of his hand while fixing an engine,” Reese couldn't help but point out. Jeanette glared, and he added, “It looks very impressive, though. What happened?”

“I destroyed my first terminator,” she declared proudly. “But I hit the power cell and didn't get away in time before it exploded. Next time I'll know better.”

“You will.” Learning from mistakes, if one had the chance to learn from them after they were made, was what kept them alive. “Did anyone else get hurt?”

Her face fell. “Bobby, on the other side of the building. Jumped out of the way of incoming fire and fell through a hole in the wall, three floors. He's dead.”

Reese nodded. He hadn't known Bob very well. Now he wondered if this was the first time one of Jeanette's comrades had died while she was nearby.

Sadly, it was something she would have to get used to.

“When will you be back in the field?” he asked her to change the topic.

“In a few days,” she answered.

“In two weeks at the earliest,” Giselle called from next door. Reese couldn't help but grin as he turned in the direction of the older woman he couldn't see behind the wall. What he did see was Kate Brewster coming into the room, together with her son Casey.

Casey's eyes widened when he saw him and he came running the last few steps, only to stop just before Reese and mutter a greeting. He then stretched up his arms and Reese took that as a sign that he needed help and lifted him up onto his sister's rather high bed.

“Are you leaving again?” Casey asked. He had a way of always focusing on when people would go away rather than when they'd be back, but then he always seemed to be disappointed when the answer was 'right now', so Reese wasn't sure he really just wanted to be left alone.

“Yes,” Reese told him after a glance at the clock. “I have to be somewhere.” There was a mission briefing in fifteen minutes, and after that he probably wouldn't have time to come again before the mission started. He could allow himself to stay another five minutes, but Jeanette had other people here to entertain her now and he did not want to impose on her family time.

“Will you come back?” Casey wanted to know from his place on the edge of the bed.

“I hope so.” No promises. Every mission could go wrong.

Reese said his goodbye to Jeanette and Kate and disappeared down the corridor, towards the barracks where the mission briefing would be held in a medium-sized side room that had only recently been made available again. For a while it had housed a group of civilians that had temporarily been sheltered in this base while passing through. Some of them had moved on, most had joined the army and had finally been send off to the training grounds, or left with various divisions going out. It had been very cramped while they were here; the bunker was at the limit of its capacity at all times. Even now the room felt more like a sleeping quarter than like the conference room it was meant to be. Reese and some others had to put the table and the chairs back in before Connor arrived to tell them what they were leaving tomorrow to do.

  


-

  


John wasn't going on this mission with his team. He wished he could, but there were several other important missions running at the same time and he had to keep an eye on those developments and coordinate things from here. He couldn't do that while in the middle of battle. Or sneaking through an underground base of the machines as it was, trying to figure out what they were doing there.

Hernandez would lead the mission. They would move back to the hidden base discovered earlier this year, explore it, and then destroy it. Since they didn't know what to expect down there, it was a very risky mission. John would rather be with them. But they all felt they should rather not postpone it until he had time to come along.

If all went well, they would be back in five days or so. John knew from the start that he would be very busy until then and be was right. For three days, he didn't leave the communications room, having his meals and short naps there. One time, his sleep got interrupted by a mission in Kansas that he had been monitoring going very wrong. He tried to help and salvage what he could, but he was too far away. Everyone died.

They were so close to the end of the war now. Every loss felt like such a tragedy.

2029 was the year the war would end. But when in 2029? If it was very early then the war would be over in little more than a year, and this mission his team was right now executing without him would be one of the last ones Kyle would ever be on.

Unless he died now, which he wasn't supposed to. John tried not to dwell on it. There was nothing he could to help his team right now anyway. They had send off a message when nearing the entrance to the hidden base and gone silent, to avoid their signals being picked up and giving them away. John was effectively blind regarding the activities of his closest men. All he could do was listen to communications and wait for them to announce the success of their mission.

What if the message never came? How long would he wait for it before he accepted that it wouldn't?

And who was he trying to fool? There would be no acceptance. If he didn't hear from them for too long, he would go there to check on them, see what he could save. He wouldn't just write them off as dead.

But those were things he could worry about if they ever came to pass. He had other things to worry about now.

On the fourth day after the others had left, all the missions that had needed his immediate attention were past the point where they did, and John allowed himself for a short break in his own room, his own bed. Before he went there, he stopped at medical. Jeannie was still there, although she was eager to leave. No one had told him that; he just knew she would want to get out of there.

It was not a unique trait of her personality. It wasn't even a family trait. It was something universally human.

When John arrived, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, obviously unhappy. She was engaged in a discussion with her mother, who appeared entirely unimpressed, although John could sense an edge of irritation in her voice. From the look of things, this had been going on for a while.

What he gathered after half a minute of listening in was that Jeannie thought she was completely healed by now and that Kate knew it and only kept her here so she'd miss the next trip her team would be going on this evening.

“My dear girl, if I were to do things because of my personal feelings for you rather than my professional opinion, I would let you go just to see you fall flat on your face halfway up the stairs,” Kate brushed off the accusations without looking up from the papers she was working on.

“I'd show you how able I am to sprint up any stairs and fire any weapon if only you'd let me! You just don't want me to prove you wrong!”

“Oh, is this where we are going now?” Kate obviously wanted to say more but stopped herself when she noticed someone coming in. She was half out of her chair to greet them when she realized it was just her husband.

“It's just you,” she observed.

“Thank you. I love you, too. What's going on here?”

“Your daughter is being her usual inspiring self. Right now she is inspiring me that build a time machine and go back eighteen years to convince myself to use a condom.”

“Eighteen years ago it was already too late,” Jeanette stated wisely. Kate scowled at her.

“Lucky you. Saved by mathematics.”

“Time travel doesn't work that way,” John pointed out, and when Kate threw him a warning glance, he added in the same breath, “Jeannie, don't be an idiot.”

“I'm not,” Jeannie pouted. “I'm being perfectly reasonable. But Mom doesn't listen to me, as if she knew better than I do what my body is doing.”

“She does,” John pointed out. “That's her job.”

“I think I can tell myself what my body can do and what not,” Jeanette growled, frustrated. “I lost a couple of fingers, not my head! I can still run around and pull a trigger.”

“You also lost a lot of blood and hit your head,” Kate reminded her. “Just yesterday you were so dizzy while doing your business I had to rescue you from falling off the toilet.”

“Yeah, thanks for bringing that up, Mom!” Jeannie blushed bright red, looking around as if to make sure they were still alone, and John had to hold back a chuckle. He could have pointed out that he had seen her do worse than fall off the potty, but didn't think she'd appreciate it.

“Actually, that's a pretty good point to bring up,” he said instead and did his best to sound all business. He looked at Jeanette and tried to look like her commanding officer and not like her father. “If you go out with your comrades without being up to it, you're endangering them all. That's not bravery; it's reckless stupidity. No one would thank you for it.”

Kate threw him a look that warned him not to go too far. Jeannie's face closed up, then took on a hard, stubborn expression. She was taking the words as his daughter, not as a soldier. John sighed internally. It seemed that they were all stuck in roles they couldn't shake off.

“You know Sergeant Reese, right?” he asked, as if he didn't know perfectly well that she did. “What do you think he would do in your situation?”

“He'd get out of here and join his team,” Jeannie insisted.

“Actually, he wouldn't,” Kate remarked. “I know that, because he's been here for a long time, and I've never seen him do it. Oh, I know he wanted to, but he didn't. Because he's smarter than that.”

“He's been in your position once, and acted stronger than he was, and it got people killed,” John explained. “He's learned from that mistake. If you are half the soldier you want to be, you will, too.”

Jeanette's expression grew even darker, but to John's secret relief, she stopped arguing. She also didn't look at him anymore, and since she couldn't run away right now he did her the favor to disappear from her direct line of sight by sitting down at Kate's desk, around the corner.

“He's right, you know,” he heard Kate say. “I know you feel like you're letting your friends down, but you're not. And who knows, if you're here two more days, maybe Kyle will come visit you again when he's back. Can't do that when you're not here.”

“Mom!” Jeanette protested, embarrassed, while John tried not to bite into the desk. “Seriously!”

“There's nothing to be ashamed about,” Kate continued to tease her. “He's pretty cute, isn't he? I mean, if we ignore the fact that it's hopeless and he'd never even get it if you _were_ to flirt with him. Not that I'm saying you are.”

“Mom, really. I can't talk to a guy, no matter how cute, without you thinking I'm hitting on him for once?” There was a shuffling of sheets, and John suspected that Jeannie was trying to get away from her mother the only way she currently could: By turning her back and pulling the covers over her head. He just wished they would stop talking about his goddamn father that way – even if he was, by the standard of this world, pretty cute.

Well. He had come to see Jeanette, and he had – the chance to actually talk to her was gone, but he'd seen she was fine so far, and Kate would make sure she stayed that way. There was nothing left to do here for John but say goodbye to his wife and then go do the other thing he had been planning on doing: Lay down in his own bed and sleep for five hours.

Jeannie didn't really react to his leaving and John sighed. In that moment, he was just glad that at least Louisa was not so difficult at every turn.

  


-

  


Something was up. Louisa could tell it was. In a place this limited, and this familiar, no change in the air went by unnoticed. She could tell that the people around her were restless, maybe nervous, but she couldn't tell why. She didn't know. Usually, she always knew, because a place this small wasn't good at keeping secrets.

There had been a certain tension in the hall earlier today, when she had crossed it to get to her class, but then she had ignored it. Some degree of tension wasn't unusual. Someone had been crying in the distance, and that hadn't been unusual either. But now, on the way back, it hit her like a hammer. No one returned her smiles and her greetings. Everyone seemed too occupied with themselves to even look at her.

She wondered what she had missed in the hours in the classroom.

Lou looked over the hall as she crossed it on the catwalk that ran along the wall, installed there once to leave more room on the floor for the countless people who used this place for shelter. Many of the occupants of this hall seemed to keep going on with their normal business. And her class had not been interrupted. Whatever was going on did not concern everyone. But it did stirr up things enough for everyone to be affected – if only so that they would put effort into acting like they didn't notice anything was wrong.

Lou wasn't going to join that game. Something was going on, and while it was obviously none of her business, she wasn't going to act like it slipped her attention. As soon as she got the chance to ask someone about it, she would.

She wasn't in much of a hurry, though. It couldn't be that important if there were no alarms sounding.

Things felt different in the next hall. Again, every single person seemed to be preoccupied with themselves and each other, but in a way that was normal. No one looked at her and then pretended they hadn't. Lou realized at once that she wouldn't find any answers here, but suddenly her desire to investigate wasn't so strong anymore. She would ask Mom later. Now that she had escaped it, the idea of going back into the first hall gave her the creeps.

There were three large halls altogether, each filled with at least a hundred people, although right now many of the blankets that marked each individual space were empty, their occupants busy elsewhere.

All of the people living here were civilians. Most of them were simply too young, too old, or too handicapped by illness or injury to fight. They made themselves useful in others ways if they could. Louisa knew many of them through their work of caring for those ill and weak that did not need to stay at the clinic, and some through other tasks, like cooking, hunting rats, cleaning and washing. Lou wasn't a big fan of the cleaning part, but she did it when she had to, without complaint, because her parents had made her understand how incredibly important it was for all their health to maintain as much hygiene as they could in this place.

These were the main places for those not in the army to stay, but there were others. Smaller rooms at the sides of narrow corridors. Those were popular because they offered a little more privacy, but at the price of being much farther from the kitchen, the washrooms, and other accommodations. And they weren't as safe – more walls and more doors meant more of a chance for crimes to go unseen. After a few reported incidents in the early years, Lou's father had stationed guards in those corridors to keep an eye on everything. Most of them were soldiers who were, due to age, illness, or injury, no longer capable of going on long missions, but could still fight if they needed to. When Jeannie had been training to be one, this had been one of her tasks as well.

These days, Jeannie spend a lot of time outside, often for days or weeks on end. Lou knew that she was still mostly just patrolling the area of the base, but sometimes she had to go out further, and while Lou was happy for her, knowing how important it was for her sister to be treated like any other soldier, a part of her always worried that she wouldn't come back.

She accepted that. It was part of the life of everyone here. And it wasn't like the soldiers going out could be certain that the place they left their loved ones in would still exist when they came back.

Chrissy's mom had died at home, after all. Li had wasted away and died without ever picking up a gun and going outside. Nowhere was safe. Lou knew enough about the world to understand that even when the war was over and the machines were gone, death would not be eradicated. Illness and accidents would still happen. Dying suddenly and violently or losing everyone they loved would just be less likely.

Lou had gone through all her life without losing anyone but her grandfather, who had been old. She was aware that she was extraordinarily lucky.

It wasn't only her family's status that was to thank for that. Her father regularly went out on missions that could get him killed. Her sister had gotten into plenty of dangerous situations. His mother daily dealt with sickness she could catch. _Everyone_ inside the bunker could get sick if there was an outbreak of something. Everyone could starve when the food didn't come for a few weeks. Everyone could freeze to death when outside, and everyone could die if the machines attacked and they were trapped down here. All of Louisa's immediate family had been present when the terminators had infiltrated them so many years ago. Neither of them had been hurt, but Chrissy, the daughter of the second-most powerful man in the army, had nearly died, and her mother had signed her own death sentence rescuing her.

It wasn't status. It was sheer, dumb luck.

Halfway through the next hall, Lou's mind was already dealing with other things. She had finished her class for the day – she'd been teaching it, since none of the adults were available for that at the moment and they had long since learned to trust her with the education of the younger ones. There would be no class tomorrow, but she had promised to help in medical for that day. Two teams of soldiers had come back with numerous injuries the day before, and Mom needed all the help she could get.

What it would come down to, probably, was Lou making rounds through the halls, checking on everyone who wasn't feeling well, so they didn't have to come to a clinic that was already busting.

And after that she would have to see what task she got assigned. Louisa wasn't specialized in anything, so she usually went where requirement would take her. If she was lucky, though, she would get to help in maintenance. She liked that. She liked learning how to fix and improve things. Stock taking, not so much.

Her thoughts got interrupted by loud clang. She jumped and turned around, just in time to see a man, scrawny and unshaven, fumble to pick up a wrench he had dropped onto the metal catwalk. Lou thought about helping him when his fingers seemed to have trouble wrapping around the tool but the look he threw her when she stopped walking was so dark and angry that she decided to leave him to it and hurry on. He was obviously not hurt or in actual need for help, and she had learned early that it was wise to leave people alone when they were in such a mood and also armed with heavy tools.

There were a lot of people in a mood like this any given day. Not everyone wanted help – that was a lesson Louisa had had to learn, but she _had_ learned it. Some people just wanted to be left alone.

Another man and a woman were walking up to the guy with the wrench and reached him just as he managed to grab his tool. Lou heard them talk quietly as she walked on, instinctively speeding up her steps. She didn't want to look like she was running from them, but she also wanted to give them as much space as she could. The words she already couldn't make out, but they didn't sound aggressive. She found herself glad that whatever that man was going through right now, he wasn't alone in it.

The catwalk ended after a bend and Louisa was back on solid ground. A set of stairs led up to another metal construction, this one not for walking but to offer additional living space. This hall had a high ceiling; high enough to put in a second ceiling on the edges. Up there, nothing much moved, just like everywhere else. Somewhere a baby was crying, overlaying a soft female voice singing off-tune, probably to calm it down. Louisa smiled to herself hearing it. She couldn't carry a tune herself, so she felt for that woman who was currently trying and failing to serenade her child.

Jeannie used to tease her about it when they were younger. Jeannie had a nice voice, and Lou had always pestered her for songs when they were children. Later she'd sometimes tried to sing to Casey, but that never worked because she sucked at it.

She'd written a song for him, once, though, when he was a baby, and made Jeannie sing it to him, which she had done exactly once.

A little boy looked through the frame of the upper level and waved when Louisa saw him. She smiled and waved back. His name was Chen and he was one of the kids she sometimes taught. Not much yet, though, because he was only four. Mostly she just watched him and made sure he didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to and was entertained while the two women who raised him where busy elsewhere. Sometimes one of them went on a mission and he would cry because he thought she wouldn't come back. That had never changed for all the times that she had come back, as if he knew that one day she just wouldn't.

He was too young for them to tell him just how dangerous the world was, Steven, one of the adult teachers, had once said. Lou disagreed – not knowing about something made that even more dangerous – but she wished he didn't have to suffer for it.

Once the war ended, would he stop crying every time one of his moms left him then, or would he continue to think the world was out to kill them forever?

A hand to her shoulder pulled her out of her thoughts. Louisa flinched, because she hadn't seen that coming, and took a step aside, thinking she was blocking the way of someone. The hand didn't disappear. It gripped her tighter and pulled, dragging her along. Without thinking, the girl dropped the bag she was holding, twisted away and ran in the opposite direction. Back to to the hall. Where people would see them.

They were at a junction, just a few meters away from the hall where Chen had been watching them. Just a few steps, and someone was already coming towards them. Lou felt relief flood over her, felt safe until she ran into the other man and he grabbed her and pushed her backwards into the anonymity behind the corner, and she realized that she wasn't safe at all.

Louisa detested unnecessary drama and thought that, at fourteen, she should be able to overcome every danger this safe haven of her people could throw at her, and so she tried struggling and kicking a few more seconds before she gave in to her fear and common sense and started screaming.

It was about then that the man holding her from behind started covering her mouth and nose with his large hand, cutting off her air.

The next seconds were a blur, but she still noted that they dragged her down the corridor to the left, the long, narrow one that hardly anyone ever used. It wasn't a dead end. It circled the halls and ended near the entrance to the bunker, but since it was much longer than any alternative route and the only thing here were two were small storage rooms that didn't hold anything needed regularly, it was mostly empty. It felt empty, colder than the rest of the chilly bunker and lit by only the barest minimum of emergency lights. It smelled empty, too – like dust and dirt – when the man took his hand away from her face and let her breathe after she had nodded her agreement not to scream.

Breathing was a privilege she knew would be taken away again if she disobeyed, so she didn't.

“We don't want to hurt you,” the man said, and the 'but' was so clearly heard in his words that they held no comfort whatsoever. “Keep quiet and we don't have to.”

A mix of pride and terror kept Lou from acknowledging his words. She kept quiet and tried to look around without looking like she was was looking around. The man before her was one of the people who had walked up to the one with the wrench earlier, and the man with the wrench was standing beside him, his face empty and hollow as he stared at her. Someone was standing beside Lou holding her still and while she couldn't see them, she was sure it was the woman she had seen with the other two before.

Louisa had seen all of them before. A lot of times. Two of them had been here for years, one since the beginning. The woman's name was Caroline – Lou remembered her from last year's outbreak of the flu. The names of the men she didn't know but one of them, the one not holding the wrench, looked like a soldier.

There was no definite attribute to tell that by. Their soldiers didn't have uniforms; the only things setting them apart from civilians were certain pieces of equipment, most of which they only carried while on a mission. Many wore their communication devices at any time, even in the short moments between missions that were mostly just the time needed to prepare for the next one. That way they were available at all times and would know at once if anything happened. This man didn't wear any com unit Lou could see. He did, however, wear a gun.

It wasn't pointed at her. He didn't even hold it in his hand. Perhaps he didn't think between the three of them they needed it to deal with a teenager. Not when they also had a wrench.

“What do you want from me?” Louisa asked, quietly so they wouldn't silence her again, and bravely, trying not to show how scared she was. She was very scared. For the first time in her life she was alone with people who, by the look of it, were very willing to hurt here, and there was no one here to keep them from it.

“Nothing. I'm sorry.” The guy with the wench. Lou wished she knew his name. She could yell the names of the people who got her as loud as she could and hope that someone heard her. Give them a reason not to make everything worse by actually hurting her when they couldn't get away unrecognized anymore. “Please just be quiet,” Wrench continued. He sounded very nervous. “I'm sorry, but we have to.”

“Will you just shut up, Rob?” Caroline snapped, and with that Wrench had a name. The woman sounded annoyed and tense. Lou twisted around to look at her and mostly saw long blonde hair falling past the woman's hips. It made her stand out. It was the reason why Lou remembered her name.

Her hand on Lou's shoulder was very hard.

“Okay, we got her,” the soldier said. “Now we need to make them understand that we do.”

“Let me scream and everybody will know it,” Lou said bravely. The man threw her a glare and stood a little straighter, and everything about his body language was a threat. She tried not to flinch but understood that her opinion wasn't wanted.

She looked around. If she managed to make a break for it, could she run? The tunnel they were in was lightly curved but offered no real cover. They could shoot her in the back. Would they do that? Surely they wouldn't. What _did_ they want?

Louisa was not only very scared but also very confused.

“This has nothing to do with you,” Rob told her with his shaking voice. “We're not going to hurt you.”

“The hell we won't,” Caroline snapped. “That's the whole point of this endeavor.”

Now Lou was _really_ scared. She tried to get away, despite her determination to not do anything foolish out of something so ridiculous and intangible as fear. It only caused her pain when Caroline grabbed her harder and yanked her back.

“The idea is to _threaten_ to hurt her,” the soldier said, reasonably and hard. He didn't see shocked by his companion's behavior at all. “We get what we want and there'll be no reason to.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Let's jut get this over with, okay?” Rob urged. “We're running out of time.”

“Good point. Let's go.”

He took Lou's other arm and between him and Caroline she was dragged back out of the tunnel. “When we reach the populated areas,” the soldier said to her, “you will keep the fuck quiet, understood? We're gonna go visit your mom and once we're there you can scream and cry as much as you want, but if you make a sound any earlier than that, I will break your arm to give us all a reason to rush you to medical.”

Lou stared at him. She couldn't bring herself to nod but she couldn't bring herself to fight him either. Logically, she knew that hurting her and then rushing her off under pretenses was the easiest path for them to take. Beyond that, she felt that she should be braver than this, that she should be able to fight them somehow or argue her way out of this, but no matter where she looked, she didn't see anything that could help her, and the words wouldn't come when she didn't even know what they _wanted_.

She wished Jeannie was here. Jeannie would know what to do.

Bullshit. She wouldn't. But she would be fighting tooth and nail. And get hurt for it, no doubt. And Casey was still small, and a crybaby. It was good they had taken her, then. Because Lou didn't doubt for a moment that it could have been any of her siblings. It wasn't about her, it was about her parents.

But why? Louisa's thoughts were reeling, caught between fear, confusion, and an overwhelming need to figure this out. The soldier was all business; he was on a mission and would stop at nothing to get it done. Lou could tell he was dangerous if crossed, but could discern nothing about his motives.

Rob was nervous, obviously unhappy with what they were doing, but doing it anyway. He was desperate and saw this as his only chance. He wanted something, badly, and he needed it now.

They were going to medical and wanted something from Lou's mom. Probably medication, or treatment, as that was the one thing Kate could give them that no one else could. Did Rob want to save someone who was deemed beyond help?

Or did he want Lou's mother to influence her father on something? Then why not just go to John directly? Did they think he cared less about his children, or that Mom was more likely to give in to threats?

And what about Caroline? There was no urgency in her, just a lot of anger. Enough anger to hurt Lou, to want to hurt _Lou_ , who barely even knew who she was.

What had her parents done to these people?

Louisa had always thought everyone loved them.

They reached the main corridor and kept going. There weren't a lot of people running round here at this hour, but they weren't alone either. Louisa thought about making a run for it, or calling for help, the first time they came across someone else, and the second time, and third time, too. The soldier couldn't openly hurt her when other people were looking, could he? But every time she so much as thought about it, his grip on her arm tightened as if he could read her mind, and she knew that he would go through with his threat to break her bones before she could get the first word out.

She should try anyway. What was a little pain if there was a chance it would give them away? She couldn't let her parent's get blackmailed into something because of her. The next time anyone was near them, she would fight, and scream.

And then they didn't see anyone in forever. They left the corridor in favor of another one. This one would go past the washing area, then past the eastern supply chambers, and would then branch off into two corridors, one of which lead to medical. They would be there in less than five minutes, and not many people would be around at this time. Only perhaps someone using the toilet or, if she was lucky, someone from Hank's organizational team getting supplies. If it was just one person and Lou alerted them, would the soldier shoot them? Would they go that far? She could risk her own health, but could she risk the life of someone else?

The door to one of the supply rooms opened when they were still a good twenty meters away. Someone came out; a woman, young and dark haired, an oddly artfully wrapped scarf holding her locks out of her face. Allison, who had been going to school with Lou for a year or so before she grew out of it. Unlike many of the other they had come across, who had regarded their small group with frowns or at least distant curiosity, she barely acknowledged their presence. Locking the door seemed to give her trouble. Lou stared at her, wanting for her to look back, to notice her, so she wouldn't take her by surprise if she ran or yelled. But Allison didn't look. And then they were past her and she defeated the lock and walked away in the other direction.

Tears welled up in Louisa's eyes. She would run now, and let that guy hurt her. She had to prove to everyone that she tried!

But her legs wouldn't move except to stumble along as they dragged her. Running wouldn't help anyone, it would just make things worse, and she wasn't her sister.

“Let her go!”

The voice came from behind them, loud and clear, and accepting no disobedience. In fact, it was spoken with such delineration and command that Lou thought it was her father for a moment, half expecting him to stand behind them with an entire army ready to fight these people like they would fight the machines.

But it wasn't her father. And there was no army with him, no arsenal. It was just Kyle, alone. And he had only one gun. But that one was pointed firmly at the soldier's head, and Lou hoped, breathlessly, that it would be enough.

Sensing her chance, she tried to run, but the soldier held her tight and pulled her back. He shifted and moved his arm and Lou knew that in a second his gun would point at her head and she would be in exactly the situation she so desperately wanted to avoid, only sooner and with Kyle rather than her mother being blackmailed using her.

But a shot rang out before the soldier could complete the movement and he let her go to stumble backwards. Lou didn't waste time freezing for more than half a second. She ran over to Kyle, only turning to look back when she was standing behind him.

She turned the moment Caroline picked up the gun that the soldier had dropped, and Kyle fired again, hitting her in the leg. The gun was dropped again as she crashed to the ground, and Rob made no move to get it. He stood frozen. There was a lot of blood. Lou was used to blood, but not here, not like this. She wondered if these people would die because of her, if whatever they had wanted to achieve was worth it.

Caroline struggled to get back to her feet. Her eyes, fixed on Kyle, left him for a moment to look at something behind them, and she grinned. It was an insane grin, Lou thought. She looked insane.

“Please,” Rob said. “We mean no harm. But we need her. My daughter is dying and Brewster's not giving her _anything_. It's not fair. If it was her own child she would _save her_!”

“Stay away or I'll shoot you,” Kyle warned when Rob made a step in their direction. But Lou felt the need to defend her mother.

“If she's not giving her anything that means nothing would save her,” she snapped. A part of her felt pity because his child was dying and he was desperate, but he had meant to use her and hurt her and her own fear made her angry.

“Like hell!” Rob yelled. It was the first time he got loud; as if something in him had snapped, and Lou flinched back instinctively. “He wasn't supposed to live either, and yet here he is!” Rob pointed at Kyle, who still had his gun pointed at him.

“We all know your mother hoards medication just in case someone she actually gives a fuck about needs it,” Caroline added, her voice strained not just from pain. “And no one cares who has to die for that, because Kate Connor can't do any fucking wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” Lou yelled back. “You're crazy!” She realized that was true. Caroline was crazy, and hateful. She looked at Lou and Kyle like she wanted them dead.

“Wake up, girl! Mommy and Daddy ain't saints! They're just pretending very well, and everyone fucking falls for it.” Caroline reached for the gun and Kyle fired again, his bullet hitting the ground right beside her hand.

“Don't make me shoot you,” he wanted in a voice that made it very clear that he would.

“Who cares? Everyone who matters is dead because of Connor and his bitch,” she snapped heatedly. “You think I care if you kill me?” Her eyes went past them, down the corridor again, and Lou turned to look for just a second and saw figures coming towards them, probably drawn by the noise. She hoped they were soldiers, but Caroline smiled her mad smile and Lou feared anything that made her happy. “Kyle,” she said.

A second later he grabbed her arm like the soldier, the one now glaring at them with a bleeding shoulder, had grabbed her, but different, and he dragged her along, towards her three attackers. Away from the people coming closer from behind. He kept his gun trained at Rob, the only one not bleeding, and Lou kept her eyes on the soldier, who was still standing and could do anything, but they were past them in seconds, and Kyle picked up the dropped gun while they passed, sweeping it up without stopping as they ran down the corridor.

Lou wanted to turn right, run to the clinic where her mother was, like a child gravitating towards the safety her parents promised in her mind, but Kyle pulled her in the other direction, going left and running until they came to the doors of the supply storage rooms. They were closed and locked. Kyle stopped briefly to try every door, always checking whether their pursuers were within view already. There was something haunted in his expression, but he never paused any longer than he absolutely had to. Lou caught on and started checking the doors on the other side, but they were locked as well. She hadn't expected anything else. Everything here was locked.

But at the end of the corridor was a small weapons chamber that was also guarded.

The two soldiers standing in front of it were already alert, and one of them unlocked the door the moment she saw them run towards them. “Please tell me that's the reinforcement you're running from,” she said just as Louisa slipped into the small, dark room.

“Not our reinforcement,” Kyle replied grimly. “I don't know where they are. They must have been held up.”

Lou wondered what that meant. Was there fighting going on in the bunker right now? Were they in the middle of a revolt? It was impossible to wrap her head around the idea. Then Kyle slipped into the room with her and the door was slammed shut, drowning them in darkness until he found the light switch.

“What's going on?” Lou asked the moment she could. “How did you know?”

“Chen told me,” Kyle said, not taking his eyes off the door. “He saw you. I informed the others but they aren't here yet.” He pulled out the handgun he had taken off her attackers and handed it to her. “Do you know how to use this?”

“No.” For all that Lou tried to be on top of everything convenient for survival, she had never fired a gun in her life. She had seen too many bullet wounds in medical to not respect and fear those things so much that she wanted nothing to do with them.

“Take it,” Kyle told her. “If they come in, pretend to know what you are doing. Don't point it at me or at yourself.”

She took it, aimed it at the door. Didn't actually put her finger on the trigger although she could tell that the safety was on. The weapon was hard and heavy in her grip and she hated it, but distantly. Her attention was fully on the door and everything she could hear through it, and her emotions were occupied by fear of what might be coming for her and relief about no longer being alone.

What she heard from the other side of the door was nothing, then voices. She expected gunfire, yelling, maybe an explosion, and a part of her traveled back to the day their bunker had been infiltrated by terminators and a man had been killed right in front of her, which was different from seeing them when they were already dead.

No gunfire sounded. There was some yelling, but not a lot of it. No explosions. Loud voices sounding from far away, then silence, and finally the door opened and a voice called, “It's me, don't shoot!” before the speaker came into view.

It wasn't her father, as Lou had secretly hoped and maybe even expected even though she knew Dad wasn't in the base right now. It was Uncle Hernandez; almost as good. She dropped her gun and jumped up and into his arms, but she didn't allow him to carry her outside, because she wasn't a child and she wanted everyone to see that they couldn't touch her.

  



	31. 2028 - 1/3

The year 2028 started badly. It started with John missing that it had started in the first place, which wasn't actually anything to write home about. He had missed many a new year's day in the last few decades, and when he noticed the date it was mostly in passing. At best he would mark another year off the number they had yet to survive before the war would likely end. Aside from that, it was a day like any other, and the children of this world knew nothing about fireworks, confetti, and staying up all night to greet the year's first sunrise.

Maybe they would, one day, or maybe all that was lost forever. Only time would tell. In their present, the day meant nothing, and John was mildly surprised when he came back to the bunker after all of two nights out there with the patrols and saw the number eight stare at him from the calender near the check-in.

That wasn't what had ruined his day, That had merely been an observation – not even filled with triumph over being another year closer to victory, as time had moved, in the end, only one day since yesterday and John had been aware of the approaching turn of the year for a while. What ruined his mood when they checked in with the bunker sometime around midnight on January 1st 2028 was the report that during his short absence, a group of people had attacked his daughter Louisa, tried to blackmail Kate, and stirred up a lot of unrest by yelling angry speeches against the Connors into the halls.

It hadn't, in the end, caused a lot of damage. Nothing too bad had happened. One of John's soldiers (he wasn't even all that surprised later when he found out it had been Kyle) had rescued Lou before the group even reached Kate for any blackmailing to go down. More soldiers had come briefly after to dissolve the commotion and arrest anyone who had gotten violent. Guards, John learned from Hernandez when he entered the bunker, had been posted in medical and Kate was not happy about anything. That was, on first sight, the extent of what Lou's attackers had achieved.

But the problem ran much deeper than that. The fact that anyone had tried at all spoke volumes – and the fact that neither John nor anyone else had seen it coming did, too.

But Kate had seen it coming, hadn't she? John couldn't stop thinking about her warning when he sat in a small conference room with Hernandez and Jones and listened to the reasons the perpetrators had given for their actions.

Three people had been at the heart of it, and acting alone until friends of theirs riled up angry people among the rest of the population. Rob Jensen had been driven by desperation: His child was ill and dying; Kate had informed them that the girl was suffering from tetanus after a seemingly harmless cut had gone untreated, and there was nothing she could do for her but put her out of her misery. Her father had prevented that, taking the seven-years-old back to their place in one of the smaller rooms, and had become increasingly convinced that Kate _had_ the means to save her but was holding them back because a little girl she didn't care about was not someone she wanted to waste them on.

Caroline Evans was a former scavenger who had served in the army briefly, then stopped. John didn't know yet why. He wasn't sure he wanted to know anything about this woman who had held a gun to his daughter's head, but felt he had to understand as much about this situation as he had to. That was his duty. So he would ask her, even though likely all he would get in response would be insults and spittle. She hated him, that much was clear, and it seemed that she hated Kate as well. Enough to hurt their children to make them suffer. Something must happened to her that she blamed them for; John thought about it and found that rather than being unable to think of anything, there were too many possibilities to narrow it down without further information. Bad things happened all the time. John and Kate wielded some power over these people's lives. It was inevitable that some of them made a connection.

(Only briefly did he wonder if whatever happened to her was something that he, indeed, could have prevented; if he was actually to blame. It didn't matter, because she had attacked Lou instead of him and no tragic past would negate that.)

The third one was a soldier named Duncan Ellison, Captain. He used to belong to Major Oda's division and had been reassigned as a commander for the patrols around this base only a few months ago. John knew him, but not well. He had never gotten the impression that the man particularly liked him, but he also hadn't cared about that as long as he did a good job – and he had. What prompted him to get involved in this scheme was beyond John at this point, but he would find out.

He did find out within a day of coming back. Ellison had, apparently, always been very critical of John's leadership abilities and all the unquestioned power bestowed upon him by circumstance – power that he hadn't asked for but had anyway. He wasn't alone in that, but no one had ever felt the need to actually act on their doubts. Until rumors got around that John and Kate Connor had saved a soldier who should have died, using up resources they now lacked for the saving of other people, for personal reasons. Then there was the second rumor that the soldier in question was John's illegitimate son (something he still couldn't wrap his head around) and people got angry. Especially those who had lost someone due to lack of medical resources. Captain Ellison was not one of those. He was simply someone who saw an opportunity.

Apparently the idea to just take his doubts to John without the threat of violence to his loved ones never crossed the man's mind. Although that was probably understandable if he saw him as a tyrant, as tyrants were traditionally very bad listeners.

John sighed and ran his hand over his face in an unobserved moments. He had never thought it would come to this.

In all these years he had concentrated on the military side of things, on fighting the enemy and keeping these people alive. He had never considered their situation from a political point of view. Not as much as he had to, anyway. Obviously, that was something he should have been more aware of.

But when? How? All his time was taken up by the war. He had no time for thinking about anything else, leaving most of the organization and managing of the bases to competent people better suited for it than him. Like Kate, and Hank, and Andrew Jackson on the other side of the city. And so far that had worked, and he'd never had to worry about this kind of thing.

But even if he had, what could he have done to prevent this, short of letting Kyle die, which was not an option? Even that probably would only have postponed the issue. It wasn't the sole reason for it, merely what pushed some people over the edge on a matter that had been brewing for a long time.

There was nothing he could do about it now but limit the damage and make sure it didn't happen again.

The next few days were dedicated to that. Talking to people, mostly – to Hernandez and Kate, and Kyle and Louisa, but also to a lot of others who didn't have a lot to do with this incident, because John needed to find out what people were thinking, how they were feeling. He also talked to Ellison and Evans, who were both in medical with gunshot wounds, facing the repercussions of their actions. It would be up to John to come up with such repercussions, and that was another thing that robbed him of sleep. They hadn't killed anyone so it didn't feel right to kill them back, but they also couldn't be let go, and the base didn't have a place for long-term prisoners. A part of John kept thinking how much easier his situation would have been if Kyle had shot to kill rather than wound.

He didn't talk to them much. He just wanted to get an idea of who they where, what motivated them. Which of their motivations were valid and which were based on groundless hatred that just happened to aim at him because they needed to hate _someone_.

Caroline Evans predictably had nothing much to say to him. The few comments she muttered in his direction were hard to make out, although he did get the general gist from her voice and the venom in her eyes. Ellison was another matter. He had arguments that he clearly had given some thoughts to. He'd known what he was doing and possibly he had even had goals that weren't entirely irrational or selfish. But he had also threatened a child to achieve them, and John had no interest in a discussion.

Rob Jensen was the last one John saw. He was being held in a small room usually used for storage, now empty of almost everything. He was quiet, but apologized eventually. Then he yelled some, crying and blaming Kate for his daughter's illness. Then he apologized again, for using Lou to get her medication. When he said that he hadn't meant to hurt her in any way, John believed him. But the other two would have, and Jensen wouldn't have been able to stop them, and he had known that when he agreed to their idiotic plan.

Jensen had been desperate. He still was. Desperation could do a lot to a man.

Even as John was in the makeshift cell with him, he couldn't stop thinking about the soldiers out in the field that he should be monitoring, the missions he had to organize, The time he didn't have to deal with things like this; with the consequences of someone's world falling apart.

In the end he didn't have a lot to say to the man. Not yet. He did wish Jensen had been a little more despicable as a person, because one way or another, there had to be consequences, and three days in lock up wouldn't cut it.

When John left, Jensen was pacing up and down, wringing his hands, begging to be let out just for a few minutes so he could see his girl.

After he had left, John learned from Kate that the girl had died, alone, while her father was out on a desperate and pointless crusade to save her.

And then he had to take a break from this matter to take care of other things, and those things took up a day, spend in the command center, and when he left there to get back to his other problem, he had to force himself because his work was far from done and too many other things needed his attention.

Altogether, a week passed before any action was taken against the three who had attacked his daughter. In this time, John swung like a pendulum between his military duties and figuring out how to deal with this. Most of the investigation was done by Kate, Hernandez, and Hank, though. In the end they presented him with options that he only had to choose from rather than come up with them himself.

Neither Ellison nor Evans did him the favor of dying of their injuries. They'd be strong enough if John decided to banish them out into the wastelands, but he wasn't sure that was such a great idea. If they survived and found other people, they could cause trouble again. He didn't put it beyond Evans to scour up a team of similarly hate-filled people and start attacking any soldier they could find simply for being associated with him. Or do it alone if she had to.

At which point she would be shot, so there was that.

Ellison was an even bigger problem. He was charismatic and convinced of being right. John didn't want to think of the problems he could cause if he found a settlement out there, full of desperate people without guidance and possibly a grudge against John and his army for not having saved them yet.

The options presented to John for dealing with these people basically came down to either banishing them or shooting them on the spot. He didn't like either, and he didn't think it would be that easy.

Rob Jensen tried to kill himself the day after he learned of his daughter's death, but due to a lack of things that could be used for that purpose in this room, he survived without too much damage. Another problem that refused to solve itself, the more cynical part of John thought at the news. The rest of him, however, actually felt sorry for the man and hoped they would be able to help him somehow. John hated that part right now. It was inconvenient, but he had never been able to kill it, and his mother had warned him once never to let it die,

Hernandez had once told him that it was this part of him that people followed.

Meanwhile Lou's life went on, and she never complained, but John had her accompanied by a soldier wherever she went for the first two days, and after four days, he noticed by coincident that she still allowed someone to trail after her when she went to class or to medical or to any other place that was more than two minutes' walk away. It fired up his anger again. She shouldn't have to be afraid in her own home, and now he didn't know if she would ever be able to stop being it.

More often than not, the soldier watching over her was Kyle. She obviously preferred it that way, and Kyle was very protective of people he cared about or felt responsible for. In half a week he would have to leave on a longer mission, though, and John already wondered if Lou would stick with other people then, or allow things to go back to normal.

John hadn't talked to Kate much yet. She was busy with this, he was mostly mostly busy with other things. Her updates and suggestions where the only point of contact they had had since he returned from his trip outside to this disaster. She'd been analytical and detached during those meetings, but John knew her well enough to know that she only bothered to hide her feelings when there were feelings to hide. She felt responsible for this mess, for pushing Jensen, Evan and Ellison this far.

For her, too, John had to take care of this quickly.

So a week after the incident, he went to the hall where Evans had lived before her arrest, with only Hernandez for company. His presence there – not just walking through but actually entering, walking between the rows of blankets and sleeping bags and makeshift little storage compartments – caused confusion and curiosity. He hadn't been here nearly often enough. Keeping these people safe had always had precedence over getting to know them.

By the time he reached the space vacated by Evans who would never return to it, everyone in the hall knew he was there. John stood in the middle of the empty square, just long enough for a grown person to stretch out, looked at all the wary, apprehensive faces around him, and began to talk.

 

-

 

Kate wasn't there for the Great Revival Tour of Their Illustrious Leader, as she was quick to dub it in her mind, but she heard about it from the first person to enter medical after it was over. Or after the first stop was over. Apparently John had had the brilliant idea to go and communicate their current problem with the rest of the population, since lack of transparency was what had caused it in the first place. (That, and Kate fucking up.) So he explained in great detail what had happened and why, why everyone carrying a gun was currently on edge, how they were going to deal with the guys who had put a gun to their daughter's head and why (not because it was their daughter but because they were dangerous and would do it again), and then he offered to answer any questions the people might have, evidently aiming to dissolve any mistrust and misconception that might still exist between them.

And obviously that had worked. The guys who showed up in medical to get their healing injuries checked out where pretty impressed and excited. Perhaps all that been missing was some communication.

John couldn't even be blamed for that. He had other things to do. But Kate was here all the time, and while she was out in the halls often and knew what was going on in general, she now felt that she hadn't paid enough attention to the actual people living here. She'd always considered herself approachable when she had the time to deal with matters that were not life-and-death, but perhaps the people hadn't known that.

Meanwhile, John had moved on to the next hall to repeat the performance. Kate didn't think that this was all it would take to turn things around, but then, this was John Connor. It just might.

Kate should probably have been out there with him, show her face as well, remind everyone that she was _always_ here and available for them – if they could catch her between one crisis and another. The royal couple. She snorted at the thought.

The truth was that she dreaded going out, feeling as if everyone could read her guilty conscience on her face. So she preferred to stay in her clinic, work even harder than she had to, and pretend that none of this ever happened.

Kate regretted not having been closer to the people who looked at her for guidance. She regretted missing the signs. As she heard Lou say goodbye to Kyle just as he escorted her to the clinic, she couldn't regret saving him. Just perhaps that she hadn't been more subtle about it.

Jim had not commented on the recent events, and for that Kate was grateful. She didn't think it was him talking about their disagreement that had started all these rumors. Things had a habit of getting out – the rest of her staff weren't idiots. And the situation had already been critical when Kyle had been wounded so badly; Kate simply hadn't taken it seriously enough. Jim had tried to warn her and she hadn't taken that seriously enough either.

How had she ended up the female lead in a drama about saving civilization? She evidently wasn't cut out for that, and it had taken her thirty years to get that. (And now, thanks to her negligence, her daughter didn't dare to walk down the hallway on her own anymore.)

Her father would hardly be proud of her right now. Bu then, maybe he would have been able to make her feel better about herself. Kate's dad hadn't been around much in her life and she had been bitter more often than not about the lack of support she'd gotten from him in basically anything, but when he had been there for her, he had been great.

Tears welled up in her eyes, but she blinked them away. This was not a time for wallowing in her own grief and self-pity. She hadn't truly mourned her father yet, and knew it wouldn't happen before the war was over. When Lou came in, Kate greeted her with a smile and a list of tasks she needed her to do. “Jeanette is coming back tomorrow,” she added, and her smile turned genuine when Lou's entire face lit up.

There was some worry, for Kate, as there always was where her temperamental oldest was concerned. Sure enough, the next day Jeannie broke over the base like a storm, willing to murder anyone who looked at her sister the wrong way. It took a stern talking to by her mother to bring her down and make her understand that at the present time, acting like that around the people whose trust they were trying to regain really wasn't helping. “They don't deserve our trust,” Jeannie replied hotly, even as Lou told her to calm down since nothing had actually happened to her, and just like Lou's fear of being alone among anyone not a close friend, it reminded Kate that this breach ran both ways.

“But we need theirs,” she said none the less, because they did, and fixing this had to start _somewhere_.

Fortunately, Caroline Evans and Duncan Ellison were removed from the base early the next day, a troop of soldiers taking them along in handcuffs, and with all the shit that Caroline was yelling in the five seconds she could be bothered to actually open her mouth, Kate regretted that they hadn't actually gagged them as well.

Rob Jensen was to stay here. He was still in his little cell and would stay there for a while. Kate occasionally went to see him and check on the damage he caused with his failed suicide attempt. Friends of his were also allowed to visit. Eventually he would be let go, since he honestly seemed to regret what he had done and there seemed to be no risk of him doing it again. (There no longer was a reason to, Kate thought bitterly.) He hadn't spoken a word yet – not to her anyway.

The other two would be someone else's problem from now on. There were bunkers out there on the very edge of the territory controlled by the army, far from any civilians that could be harmed or influenced, and the two were being send, separately, to two of those, where they would be locked up until the war was over. Kate had pointed out to John that soldiers could also be influenced, and they had guns, but he insisted that he knew and trusted the people running those bunkers. She hoped that wouldn't come to bite them in the ass at some later point.

“How long do you think that's going to go well?” she asked the evening after they had left, when she met John in the corridor and they ended up in their room where they could talk, even though they both needed to be elsewhere. “They get out, or they transform everyone into traitors, or they are let out because your men up there have other problems than watching over prisoners. Or they are killed on the way or by an annoyed soldier while in containment and people here about it and accuse you of having planned it that way.”

“People have called for their heads here, so I'd say the number of protesters is going to be small,” John replied, infuriatingly unimpressed. “And besides, what exactly did you want me to do? Shoot them right here and be done with it?”

It didn't seem like such a bad idea. Kate wanted them gone from this world, as if that could somehow erase this whole chapter from history. But being selfish with life and death had refused to work to her advantage before, and she had to be better than this. “I just don't think it's going to work out. What precautions did you take? We have neither the manpower nor the resources to keep people imprisoned for long.”

“It doesn't have to be long. Just until the war is over. Then we can take care of all the other stuff.”

“And when will that be, exactly?” She tried to sound challenging but only ended up sounding eager to her own ears. And to his, obviously, if the look he threw her was anything to go by. He looked annoyed. Impatient.

“How would I know?” he asked. “My skills of prophecy only go so far.”

“Don't give me that! I can tell when you are pulling things out of your ass, and when you talk like victory is only a few months away, you're not! So tell me! How much longer?”

“I can't tell,” John said, very slowly, with forced patience. “My mom didn't know, so she never told me. As you know. But I can tell that, baring disaster, it can't be that much longer now. We have the upper hand out here. We're gaining more and more territory, and getting deeper and deeper into L.A., and once we found Skynet's core and took out the defense grid, it'll be over. And once my next mission is over, they won't even be able to make new terminators anymore. So I'm guessing that most of the war is behind us. But if you want a date, I can give you, at this point, exactly as much any anyone else.”

“Alright. I get it.” Maybe he was speaking the truth. Kate didn't really believe it – she hadn't believed that in a very long time. But John was honest with her when it came to the stories from the future. She was the only one who knew; not even Hernandez had been told a word of it. She was the only one he could share it with, so when he said he didn't know when the war would end, or which soldier he would send back to die for him one day, he was probably speaking the truth.

Back in the day, Kate had been convinced that he knew how long the war would be, and chose not to tell her because the truth was depressing. And for a long time she'd hardly thought about it, accepting that he wouldn't tell her one way of another and that wondering about it had no point. She'd gotten used to not asking. These days, when victory seemed just around the corner, it was easier to believe him because she couldn't think of any reason for him to lie.

On the other hand, however... It was still very possible that he knew who he would send to the past. It still made sense from him not to tell her. Kate sometimes looked around and wondered if the person was somewhere within her view, but never for long. She didn't like thinking about it too much, she didn't have time to think about it too much, and it wouldn't give her any answers. Like the end of the war, she had gotten used to not asking.

But it was likely that the man was already around. It had to be someone John trusted when the time came. Hernandez, perhaps? There was no one John trusted more, and Kate's heart clenched at the thought.

But would Hernandez really leave behind Chrissy? She wasn't so young anymore, and was raised more by Kate and her team than him anyway, but surely he wouldn't do that to her. Or would he? For John? There was little he wouldn't do for John.

And maybe something would happen to Christina, the way something had almost happened to Lou, and he'd have no reason to stay here.

Kate tried to push the idea away, but once she'd had it, it wouldn't leave her alone. Hernandez was older than her and John, but not so old that it would slow him down. He remembered the world of Before and knew how to handle it. He was an obvious choice.

She shook her head as she let go of the thought, and made a dismissive gesture when John looked at her questioningly. No, not questioningly – quite the opposite. Like he knew exactly what she was thinking. Sometimes she hated that about him. “I trust you know what you are doing,” she said, in a way that signaled the end to this conversation. Leaving it all to him for a little longer. The time for answers would come.

For now, there was the time for a new mission. Several new missions, of course – as always. But one that Kate was particularly interested in.

Little over a year ago, the first terminator model listed as T-800 in the hacked Skynet databases had made an appearance. Two of them had come close enough to nearly kill John, along with their daughter, and the reason for that was not their brilliant acting abilities. The reason was that everyone knew that terminators only looked like people if one didn't look too closely. At closer observation, their skin looked like rubber, because it was. The knowledge had created a mistrust of particularly dirty people, but it had also saved countless soldiers from ambushes, because they had been able to identify the terminators by their artificial appearance. It was something they had relied on to the point where obviously the men who had led those 800 models to their base hadn't thought anything was wrong simply because the skin had looked real.

No one had gotten a really good look at those terminators that night, between the fighting and the explosions. But there had been other encounters since, some equally fatal, some nearly so, and on top of the reports that “the guys had looked really fucking alive, sweat and stink and all”, there had been enough left of some of the destroyed ones for Kate to study.

Kate and some engineers. Because there was an awful lot of technology involved. But what was interesting to _her_ was the skin. And the flesh. Which turned out to be identical to human skin and flesh. Not just looking perfectly alike; it _was_ human skin and flesh.

There had been some horror, following that. Kate knew from those who had lived it that the machines running the extermination camps had their prisoners skin some of the corpses of those exterminated and collected that skin. The idea came up, because it seemed obvious, that they were now using that skin to patch it over their metal interior in an attempt to be more convincing.

There were several things that didn't add up with that theory, to the relief of literally everyone. For one, all the camps were closed for good and had been for years, and most of their storage had been destroyed with them. Further, the pieces Kate had gotten her hands onto had all been made from fresh, living tissue, not something dead out of a freezer. And last but not least, them machines would have used that skin years earlier if they had taken it for just that purpose. So they were not dressed in dead people. But they were still dressed in something human.

Kate had a laboratory, but it lacked the means to make truly conclusive tests – never mind that she herself lacked the education for them. Still, based on what they knew, they eventually came to the conclusion that cloning was the most likely answer. The machines probably took parts of the dead bodies (and possibly some living ones) to study and replicate. They had needed a while to perfect that. It made sense.

Also, John had told her that according to his mom's source from the future, the machines used cloned flesh. That had been a pretty big hint. Although he had admitted that he didn't know if that was a fact, or something people in the future – their _Now_ – believed for lack of evidence to the contrary.

Kate chose to believe it. It was less horrifying than any other explanation.

And soon they would get their proof. Scouts had discovered a complex of factory buildings that were entered by metal endoskeletons and exited by finished T-800, skin and all. A relatively small team of soldiers would go in there, find out what was going on, and then blow it up from the inside, preferably after getting out themselves. If it was what it most obviously appeared to be, that would hamper the terminator production quite a bit.

It would take at least a year to rebuild a complex like that, if the army would let them. And while Kate knew she was getting her hopes up too much, probably, she hoped that another year was longer than this war would last.

 

-

 

John straightened his back, then leaned back to try and get the knots out of his spine. His muscles ached and his neck was screaming at him. He hadn't been fighting, or even done anything physically strenuous all day. All he'd been doing was standing bent over maps and papers for hours. Had his body always protested this much when he did that?

Yes, actually. If there was any sign that the human body had not been developed for organization and administration, this was it. But he felt that it happened more quickly now than it had when he'd been younger. It was time for this war to end, because he was getting old.

And he was getting tired. His gaze fell on Kyle, sitting in a corner of the room in quiet conversation with Ava, Tyson and a couple of others and he immediately felt guilty, knowing that wishing for a soon end to this war he was wishing for a soon death to that man. And he always felt that way. And a part of him, a shameful, hidden part that he rarely acknowledged, was looking forward to the time when it was over, when Kyle was gone and he could finally put him to rest. Selfish.

But then, what did this world have to offer to that guy, exactly?

(That argument only made him feel better as long as he didn't remember that there would be peace and the rebuilding of a world waiting for Kyle at the end of it all, if only John would let him have it.)

“You got that?” he spoke into headset. “Any questions?”

“It's all pretty clear, Sir,” came the dry reply. “Though you could come along and hold our hands through it, if that makes you feel better.”

John snorted softly and refused to reply, not in the mood for this kind of banter. Justin Perry could get away with it, but right now John didn't need that kind of attitude and his lack of reply made that clear. “They're leaving in half an hour and should meet with you in two days. There won't be any communication until about an hour before they get to you.”

“Got it,” came the short reply. Justin had gotten the message. “I'll be sending four of my own, including Rias and Scanelli, with Reese, Stevens, and Montag. They know the area as well as it can be known. I'll send you a signal once they take off, then we'll stay quiet until the mission is over.”

“Do it that way,” John agreed. It wasn't entirely how he would have handled it, but he'd left the coordination of this mission to Justin and trusted the man's experience. If things went sideways, they'd have to improvise anyway. “See you in a week.”

They ended the connection and John stood a while longer, looking down at his papers with an aching neck. A massage would be awesome right now. Alternatively, he would like to lie flat on the ground and not move his head for a while, but if he did that here and now, everyone would think he had been poisoned or suffered a heart attack, and there would be panic and confusion. So he stayed upright and concentrated on the lines on that map. Lines that were suggestions, ideal routes that would be taken in an ideal scenario. Which meant they would probably not be taken. John wouldn't have contact with his men or Justin during this mission and so couldn't influence things in any way. He'd have to wait until they came back to learn how it went.

It would probably go well. Kyle was with them, and he couldn't die yet. But again, John wondered if he was a fool to rely on that. Maybe everyone _would_ die and John was dooming the world be sending his father along. He couldn't know. He hadn't chosen Kyle for this so his continued existence would ensure the success of this mission (or so he thought – he wasn't entirely sure, he never was), but because his skills and knowledge made him one of the best options for it.

John himself had other obligations. He would need to coordinate two missions in Kansas and Missouri, and then go on one of his own near their base, where the machines were about to set up a camp that the army would rather not have in their neighborhood. It was not usually a matter that the General had to handle in person, but there were a lot of terminators type 750 and up hanging around there, and they did the imitation of human beings rather well by now, as long as they didn't attempt a normal conversation. John wanted to see them, he wanted to oversee the mission himself so that none of the less experienced soldiers let themselves be fooled, and he wanted to test out the new, electromagnetic detectors that were supposed to identify the metal skeleton of a terminator even through layers of skin and flesh.

If Justin's mission went as planned, there would be a lot fewer terminators around afterward, but they still would be around, and they would always be a danger until Skynet was gone and all their circuits were fried.

But it would be a major victory. And they _needed_ that victory. Things had been going increasingly well in the past few years, but the human race was still close to the brink of extinction, and any major set back could tip the balance back in favor of the machines.

The others were discussion something when John came over. It wasn't mission related. Sometimes soldiers talked about things not directly related to the war. John was always pleasantly surprised when he walked in on a conversation like that – even now, because most of their topics still had to do with battle and misery.

Right now they appeared to be talking about the education their children got in what passed for school here. An interesting topic that John cared about, but didn't have much influence on. He wasn't present enough to assume control over matters such as this, and generally it was necessity and availability that determined the kids' lesson plan, not the opinion of a committee who decided what things beyond basic survival were worth knowing.

“I'm just saying,” Garv was just saying. “It can't hurt for them to know a little bit about history, and art and shit, you know. I mean, those of us old enough to remember all that from school are not going to be around forever, and then it'll be lost.”

“There are still some books lying around,” Ava pointed out. “They'll get it back when the war is over.”

“They'll have other things to concern themselves with then.”

“They have other things to worry about _now_.”

“I don't mean to give them a collage education. Just some idea that there are things out there beyond mere survival. Just a little bit of art, and literature, maybe a poem or two. To know those things exist.”

“They know that,” Sergeant Montag, Clara, pointed out. “They just don't care.”

“Yeah, well, that's exactly the problem.”

“It will be a problem once someone's survival depends on being able to recite the second act of Hamlet,” said Ava.

“I don't even know what Hamlet is,” Clara mentioned proudly.

Clara was a child of the war. She didn't seem all that interested in learning about colors.

“What do you think, Reese?” Garv asked, looking at Kyle who had until now listened while checking his plasma gun. “Don't you think kids should know more about poetry?”

Kyle thought about it for a second before shaking his head. “The need to focus on survival skills for now. Anything else is irrelevant.”

“I thought you of all people would care,” Garv said, pulling a face. Kyle looked at him blankly and shrugged. Clara snorted.

“What do you think, Boss?” Ava asked, looked at John. John made a vague gesture that could mean anything but mostly meant that he hadn't given the issue much thought, which was basically his answer.

“I think Reese is right. We got to focus on other things right now. The war will be over soon, and then we'll have to make a list of things to teach our children, and sort it by necessity. But even then, I can tell you that art and lyric will range way after food related stuff, physics, and architecture.”

“Yeah, no doubt about that.” Garv glared at them. “I'm just saying, culture shouldn't be completely forgotten when we have time for it. What else will be left of the world if we lose that for good?”

“People,” Ava answered, drily. “Then again, I do have some fond memories of paintings, and music, and even a poem or two. I don't think humanity will suffer for having lost that, but personally, I liked it. However, no one's gonna stop our young from learning about if if they want. It's not like we're going to burn all the books. I just don't think it should be mandatory. Not for a long time, anyway.”

“You know poems?” Kyle unexpectedly asked. “Which ones?”

Ava gave him a long look, then scrunched up her face in concentration. “Just two or three, and only one is in English. One of my brothers had to learn it for school and it got stuck in my head. Well, part of it anyway. It was hella long, I didn't even bother reading all of it. Neither did he, for that matter. I don't know why their teacher thought anyone would.”

“What was it called?”

John threw Kyle a surprised look. He sounded almost eager, if in a subdued way. It wasn't something he'd ever seen him be outside of the final phase of an important mission, when he he couldn't wait to bring the machines the defeat the had been working on.

“I don't remember. Just a few lines. Something about the end of the world having been long ago, and judgment day. Back then I thought it sounded cool. Shortly after the world actually ended, and the words kept ringing through my mind over and over until I hated them. Now I can't really get them together anymore.”

“For the end of the world was long ago,” Kyle said. “And all we dwell to-day, as children of some second birth, like a strange people left on earth, after a judgment day.”

“Yes, that's it!” Ava stared at him in fascination, and John realized that he did, too. “Wow. I didn't think I'd ever see or hear that again. How'd you know it?”

“A man from my first division collected poetry,” Kyle told them. “He died, but I found his notes in a corner of the library of our old base. This is just a fragment of something long he'd only collected a few pages of, but it stuck in my mind. I always thought it had been written after the war.”

“You mean it wasn't?” Clara asked.

John was impressed, too. He knew the poets of old had been strangely obsessed with the end of the world, but those words were almost ridiculously accurate.

Still, if Ava had learned them before the war, they had to predate it. A part of him was almost disappointed. For a second he had thought they had to be wrong about the time line and this was really about _their_ apocalypse, which would mean that even now someone out there might try to put their misery into some form of art; that survival wasn't all they had left to do.

Maybe Garv did have a point, after all.

“To be fair, I think if we force kids to memorize lines or learn about the color compositions of paintings, they won't care enough to actually appreciate it,” John mused. “Especially if there are more pressing matters to worry about. Speaking from experience, I gotta say that I had some classes on literature and theater and art the few times I actually went to school like everyone else, and I hated every minute of them, because they felt so pointless.” And his mother kept telling him to appreciate them because things like that might be gone soon, which hadn't helped. The world had been full of things John was supposed to appreciate for its being doomed, and it had been too much. It was as if on top of being a useless distraction, the cultural stuff hated John right back for not caring enough. There had been endless list of things to feel guilty about. These days, John was way better at differentiating.

And it wasn't like Sarah had had any right to complain. In the education she gave John, which was most of the education he'd ever received, the fine arts were not a priority. Her philosophy was “Survive first, worry about everything else later”. It was the way they all lived their lives now. “Actually,” he remembered out loud, “the only poem I ever consciously read and sort of remembered was just something on a thorn-out piece of paper my mother had used as a bookmark.”

He regretted the words almost the moment he said them, as memories came up of that book, a novel about something or other, and the piece of paper sticking out. About reading the poem, desinterestedly at first and then with a know in his stomach, and wondering – forever, as he'd never asked – if it was a coincidence that just this one happened to be on the page his mother had torn out of whatever other book she had mutilated.

Kyle sat up a little straighter and focused all of his attention on John, again with that eagerness that was so surprising in this setting. “What was it?”

“Nothing special,” John said, sitting down on one of the boxes standing around. “Something about love and stuff. Typical poem, you know? Mom wasn't big on poetry and art, it was just something that happened to be on the piece of paper she was using.”

“Do you remember the words?” asked Kyle, and John realized that he really wanted to know. Like it meant something. “You said you did, Sir.”

John couldn't remember him ever being so direct with an inconsequential thing.

“Uh,” he said. “It's been more than thirty years, you know? And it really was nothing remarkable.” But Kyle kept looking like him in hopeful expectation, and so did everyone else, and John realized he wasn't getting out of this one.

So he shook his head softly and said, “Uh,” again, and then, “Love is not everything. It is not food nor drink, nor sleep, not a roof against the rain.” And he was pretty sure there was something wrong in there already, but then, who should correct him? “Nor is it a floating boat to men that sink, and raise, and sink, and raise and sink again. Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, nor clean the blood, not set the broken bone. Yet many men are making friends with death, even as I speak, for lack of love alone.” His speech was halting and it was probably pretty obvious that he was filling in many a word that he couldn't quite remember with a substitute. But as he spoke, the memory came back and each line came a little easier than the next. “It well may be that in a difficult hour, pressed down by pain, and begging for relief, or nagged by–” And there he stopped. “Oh well,” he said, with a new shake of his head. “I lost the rest. Sorry. It's been too long and I never actually learned it in the first place.”

Kyle nodded wordlessly and sat a little straighter as he inspected his weapon, back the business part of their meeting. John could tell he was disappointed, though, and cursed himself once again for ever having said anything in the first place.

So Kyle like poetry. Huh. Had Sarah known that?

No, of course she hadn't. Just like she hadn't known basically anything else about the guy. John wondered what she would have thought of if had she known and as always came up blank.

“Anyway,” John said, getting back to business. “We don't actually have time for this. You're supposed to be on your way in ten. Are you ready?”

“Yes, Sir,” all four answered, almost in unison. They wouldn't have let themselves get distracted by discussions about education if they hadn't been.

“Any questions so far?”

“No, Sir.”

“Good. McStevens is picking you up with his truck a kilometer out of the secure zone. You're expected back in a week. We won't have much contact in between, so good luck.”

“You, too, Sir,” Clara said, then nodded at a point somewhere behind John to include it as well. He didn't turn to look who had joined him, already having recognized the sequence of the steps coming up. His team packed up and started towards the exit. They would meet with Justin, and then three of them would infiltrate the cyborg-skin-factory with some of Justin's team, while Ava and McStevens would join the rest for infiltrating a relays-center not far from there. John watched them go and wondered if Kyle was looking forward to seeing his old comrades again. It was hard to tell, because he tended to keep his surface blank and his actions and words focused on his tasks and on general issues. It made him a very good soldier and valuable asset, but John only very slowly began to get a picture of the person he was underneath.

Or would be, if the war would let him.

Somehow, in all the years John had felt like his mother always expected him to be better – stronger, tougher, more competent – to live up to his father's example, he'd rarely considered that there had to have been more to the guy that that.

 _I grew up in your shadow_ , he thought at the young man just now walking out of the room, _and I'm sorry for all the times I resented you for it._

He sighed, and turned around. Hernandez towered beside him, somehow making him feel impossibly young through a few additional centimeters. “Alright,” he said. “More work.”

“Always,” his old friend agreed. Together they walked back to the table, and John removed the sheets of paper relevant to Justin's mission to replace them with a messy folder relevant to his own. His thoughts kept circling around Kyle, and his mother, but only in the back of his mind, where they always were. Where they would live on, long past the end of the war.

Part of Justin's mission, the one Kyle was not involved in, included checking out a recently abandoned facility of the machines, that had been giving off strange readings on their scanners before they disappeared. John suspected he knew what had been going on there – Skynet had started playing with time travel technology. It already knew defeat was an option now and was planning to evade it by changing history in its favor.

Was changing history truly an option? Had it ever been? John had lived his life with the assumption that it wasn't. Everything he was, everything that happened was a result of someone traveling to the past as a factor that didn't belong there, and the fact that they did that was a consequence of their doing it as well. A stable, closed loop. Inescapable.

But Skynet clearly thought that it would benefit from sending back a terminator to kill Sarah Connor. It was the most highly developed intelligent system of all time and it had done its calculations and decided that changing the past was something that could be done. It didn't know that the attempt to win that way was what would bring on its defeat in the first place, that deploying that terminator would lead to the creation of the very person it wanted to erase, but what if that was just one possible outcome? Had John made it too easy for himself by simply accepting that he couldn't change things? By refusing to fight for fear of breaking something?

Skynet was the enemy, but it was clearly smarter than anything else on the planet. Who was John Connor to think he knew more than that super-computer did?

On the other hand, could he risk everything for the selfish desire not to lose his father?

Then again, there was more to in that that. If John tried and succeeded, he might save not only Kyle, and his mother, but also the world. He could prevent the creation of Skynet and none of all this would ever have happened.

The paradoxical qualities of that idea were clear to him, but Skynet was trying to change things by introducing a time paradox and had obviously decided that it would work.

“Are you actually hearing anything I said, or is this a good moment to tell you I slept with your wife without getting decked?” Hernandez asked him.

John had been listening. He was aware of the route Hernandez was proposing and already knew that he would agree, safe for the last five hundred meters. “”What if you had the chance to save someone you lost, but there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would go terribly wrong?” he asked.

Hernandez gave him a long silent look. He didn't ask what the question was about. He asked, “Someone I lost? Like Ana?”

“Like Ana,” John confirmed.

“I'd do it.” There was no hesitation, naturally. “Even if it goes wrong, at least I _tried_. Seriously, how could I not?” If only it were that simple.

“What if it going wrong would not only mean you still lost Ana? What if it means you lose someone else as well? Like Chrissy.” Like everyone. But Chrissy would be enough.

Again, his old friend gave him that long, long look, his eyes clouded. “That sounds like a sucky choice to me.”

“Well? Would you still do it? On the off chance that it might work?”

“No. Not at those stakes.”

John took a deep breath. “Man,” he said. “Couldn't you at least be a little torn about that choice?”

“No. Seriously. Ana would have my ass for it. She died for our girl; she wouldn't have anyone risk Chrissy for her sake.” He lifted a finger when John opened his mouth to speak. “And before you decide to be an utter bastard and throw our dead son in there, the answer's the same. Pablo knew he was risking his life to fight for everyone, and he wouldn't want anyone to jeopardize what he died for, for his sake.”

Maybe. Only the dead would know for sure. But Hernandez obviously believed it and it probably helped him through each day, so John wasn't going to argue against it. He had, he found, actually already gotten what he'd wanted: Confirmation that he should stay on the path he'd been walking his whole life: Do nothing and let history sort itself out.

He shook his head slowly. There was too much at stake. Even if he _could_ change things, he really shouldn't. All in all, what happened was among the best possibly outcomes. The machines would orchestrate their own downfall, and the war would eventually end. All that wouldn't happen if Skynet never send the terminator back. Which meant that John and Kate had to remain the only people to know about it, because if somehow, in whatever way, the machined found out, all would be lost.

Hernandez couldn't know either. Hernandez, who had been by John's side longer than anyone else, and who even now accepted this strange topic without question. Would John lose his faith if he told him about time travel and all that? Would he think his friend was nuts? At this point, probably not.

John still couldn't tell him, and _wouldn't_ tell him. One day, he might have to justify this apparent lack of trust. Not today.

 

-

 

It was icy outside. A storm was blowing the snow against the ruins, but between the ruins it wasn't so bad that they couldn't go on. While all of them were used to the weather delaying or stopping any plans they had made, that was a relief. Everyone wanted this mission over with, and they wanted to get it _done_. Every T-800 less in the world was a good thing.

Although Reese wondered how long they would have to be gone completely for people to stop shooting any strongly build stranger that came towards them out of caution.

Right now there were no strangers of stronge build around, only Montag, Garv, Mildred Rias, who had greeted Reese with an unexpected and startling hug when he'd entered their base, and a man named Nguyen, whom Reese didn't know but who was not exactly of strong build. Also, he was jittery in a way the machines couldn't emulate, and had not been barked at by the dogs in Perry's base. Definitely human. And currently on the look out for enemies.

Reese could see one from where he was crouching behind a boulder. It was hard to make out in the twilight, just a hint of metallic movement in between the chaos of snow, and far away, but definitely there. Facing the other way. So far it had to turn theirs. A terminator, but one without skin, its movements abrupt and stiff. Unsettling; like something that should look human but didn't.

“I see one,” Nguyen told them briefly after, when he slipped back into cover with them. “The gates are secured, though. Magnetic lock, by the look of it, and the area is under camera and infrared surveillance. No way to sneak past that from here.”

“We'll have to try the other side, then,” Captain Rias decided. She took out the old spoon she always carried in her breast pocket and put in her her mouth, her weathered face thoughtful as she looked across the areal and past the entrance to the complex, weighing her chances. (Reese wondered if that was the same spoon she'd had when he had been with the 132nd, or if she'd replaced it at some point.)

“The fence goes all the way around,” Montag reminded them.

“We might be able to climb it.”

They'd have to. Else, the only way inside there was a full-on assault of the gates, and then every machine nearby would come to greet them. They weren't equipped for that. This was not that kind of mission.

Security here was tighter than they had thought, but they wouldn't turn around before they had exhausted all options.

A tuck came towards their boulder through the snow. They could see its shadow emerging from the whirling twilight. No lights – the machines had no need for them. Reese and the others ducked deeper into their cover and the truck went past, and then Reese had to pull Garv back when he wanted to sit up because another truck followed, half a minute behind.

They passed close enough for Reese to see the machines behind the wheel. These weren't automated vehicles. They were just trucks, used by the machines for transport like they would be used by a human.

The idea came suddenly, but it stood clearly in Reese's mind, cemented the moment the first truck approached the gate and it opened for it. The other one was still very close to their hiding place. Rias looked at him the moment he shifted position and nodded. Reese slipped away before any of the others even caught on, running after the truck in a crouch, making sure to stay in the shadow of the vehicle.

The truck, already going at little more than walking pace, slowed down nearly to a stop as the first one passed the gate, and Reese managed to catch up and pull open the back door. It wasn't locked; the lock was broken, the metal around it molten. Reese slipped inside, with no time to worry about being greeted by a dozen pair of glowing red eyes in the dark. He wasn't. There was only the dark, and the light of early dawn coming in through the front window. The driver wasn't separated from the rest of the truck. The driver was a terminator.

A terminator that didn't react to Reese's presence. Either it didn't notice him, or it wasn't programmed to do anything other than drive. Reese assumed it was the first option. Terminators, even the more primitive models, were designed to show a minimum of autonomous behavior, within certain parameters. Ignoring an enemy who had stolen into their vehicle was not something they did.

Which meant that the moment the machine realized he was there, he was dead. And there wasn't just the driver, there was the one outside as well. Reese made it to the other end of the truck just before it passed the gate and the lonely other terminator out there, and all the cameras. He found cover in the blind spot just behind the driver's seat, holding his breath and holding his semi-automatic.

Nothing happened. The truck moved on, slowly but steadily, and Reese heard the gate close when they were through, just faintly over the rumple of the old engine and the clunk of metal that sounded through the truck every time the wheels hit a bump underneath the snow. The door didn't swing open but it sat loosely in its frame, a silent threat waiting to give him away.

Around him, the walls of the truck were lined with machine parts. No... terminator parts. Arms, legs, three torsos in a neat row. Strapped to the walls so they wouldn't fall over. There were dark spots on two of them, and while it was too dark to see much and there was no time for a closer inspection, Reese recognized the pattern of an army-issue plasma rifle.

These were pieces of destroyed machines, then, not newly manufactured ones waiting to be assembled. The army did their best not to leave anything behind for just this reason – what was left of the machines was collected for their own purposes or destroyed – but sometimes there was no time for that. Or after the battle there was no soldier left to do so.

He didn't know how much further the truck would go before it stopped and was unloaded, so he needed to get out quickly. He also didn't know where a good place for that would be. Inside the complex, in any case. They were still outside, he could tell, but it couldn't be for much longer.

He could hear the sound of a gate opening a minute before the movement and the acoustics changed and he knew his truck had entered the building, right after the first one. The moment the gate began closing behind them, a shrill sound made him flinch; like an alarm echoing through a great hall.

He'd been discovered! His reflexes screamed at him to make a run for the gate, training made him lift his weapon, but even as he turned around to aim it at the terminator driving the truck, the enemy closest to him, he knew that he would not make it out of this alive.

His luck had finally run out, like he'd always known it would. Frustration and rage nearly made him scream when he thought about the mission he was failing here, about how important it was. All he could hope now was that Rias and the others managed to get inside anyway, that he hadn't ruined it for all of them.

The driver didn't turn around. It didn't react. Maybe it didn't have a weapon. The thoughts that ran through Reese's mind in split-seconds came to an abrupt halt when heard the sound of shots fired, far away. Outside.

He hadn't been discovered. The others had been.

Plasma fire had a distinct sound, but both sides where using that kind of weapon. Reese listened to the sound of fighting without being able to tell who was shooting when, as he moved soundlessly to the end of the transporter and peered out through the gab in the door. He could see a hall, pipes on the wall, and another transporter parked nearby. No way to look around without opening the door further, so he did that, found a good spot to hide. The moment his feet touched the ground and he started running, the fighting outside was drowned out by an explosion and ended. It hadn't lasted for half a minute.

Reese's hiding place between the pipes opened into a tunnel in the wall, and after a brief glance into the hall he had just escaped he took it. The hall was too big, too hard to overview, and the driver of his transport just got out and opened the back to unload the pieces, just like the terminator driving the other truck, parked beside it, was doing. Reese had only just made it out.

Neither of the metal skeletons made any move to look for him, or were concerned with the noise outside. So the threat had been eradicated. Rias, Montag and the others were dead, and it was all up to Reese now.

He ran down the narrow passage filled with the knowledge that he wouldn't make it out of this alive either. Even if he managed to set his explosives and get out of this complex before it blew up, the probability that it would take out all the machines inside and around it and he would make it more than ten meters across open terrain was tending towards zero. And with the discovery of the others, chances were that the machines guarding this factory were all alert now, and on the look-out for any intruder that might have slipped through. Reese was operating on borrowed time, and he could only hope to accomplish what they had come for before the counter had gone all the way down.

They had no deep knowledge of this place, but if the previous machine-operated facilities were anything to go by, the power generator was somewhere in the basement. Far down, probably. The building wasn't very high on the surface, three stories on the highest point, so a lot of it was probably underground. Reese made it to the end of the tunnel and then along a narrow gallery framing a circular hall, easily dodging the two metal-frame terminators patrolling it. Their glowing red eyes gave them away in the twilight of the hall. If they saw Reese, they would immediately make out his heat signature, but by timing it right they were easy to avoid.

The fact that most of the machines moving freely around here were human shaped worked to his advantage, as it left him with many paths actually accessible to him. At one point he was halfway down a winding stairwell when the metallic, rhythmic clang of terminator feet came towards him from below. He turned and soundlessly made his way back up, managing to find cover in a gab in the wall of pipes and beams that framed it. The terminator walked past him without noticing his presence and Reese slipped out and down to the next level before it could turn around and cut off his path again.

The third floor down was tricky. Wide spaces, not a lot of cover, and seemingly no path leading further into the complex, save the wide one with the tracks that was used by the machines for transport. It wasn't currently being used, but Reese couldn't see down the soft slope and around the corner enough to tell whether he would be running right into a group of enemies if he went that way. If he did – and it was likely – he wouldn't stand a chance.

There was a bit of cover to his right and he hurried over, crouched down behind some boxes, and observed the room from this new angle. The ceiling was high, connected with the upper floor. It was circular, and a long tube – probably some kind of lift – was leading up. Lights blinked, speaking of activity. He could hear the sound of machines, clanking and banging and humming, closer than before.

There seemed to be another opening near the big one. When Reese got as close as he could, he saw that it was a door. It could lead to another passage taking him where he wanted to go, or to a room full of terminators. It could be open or it could be locked. If it was locked, Reese would be stuck out in the open twice as long, having to get back here. If it opened and led him to a bunch of enemies, his mission would be over before he could complete it.

Lacking an alternative, he prepared to run, only to hold back at the last possible moment when he looked around one last time and saw a figure approaching from the right, down the stairs that had led him here. It moved quietly, without the noise accompanying the hard feet of the terminators on the hard floor, and so he had missed it, and now his heart nearly stopped, and then it leaped.

It was a person. Not a machine, but a man, coming down the stairs with slow steps. He was wearing a leather jacket and a headband and a thick, dirty beard that almost hung down to his chest. He was looking around slowly, scanning the area like Reese had, and it was something about the way his head turned on his neck so very evenly that made Reese hesitate to reveal his presence, that made him ignore the leap of joy that came from realizing he was not the only one down here among enemies and made him look again.

The man stood in the twilight, looking slowly from left to right. Not behind him. Searching for something, not securing the area. Nothing about his body language indicated fear, or even wariness. He didn't care if anything saw him, because he was a machine himself. The moment Reese accepted that possibility, it was glaringly obvious.

Fortunately, reaching that conclusion didn't take longer than a second or two, so by the time the T-800 stepped into the hall and walked towards Reese's hiding place, he he was down on the ground, holding his breath and pressing against the tube in a way that send him back several years, into the tunnels underneath the camp. The terminator passed so close Reese could smell him. Sweat, dust, a faint hint of decay. He hadn't realized the smelled so real, had never before been so close to one that wasn't shooting at him or on fire.

It walked past him, following the bend of the wall. If it kept going this way, it would eventually reach the door that was Reese's only alternative to certain discovery, but right now its back was turned and Reese no longer hesitated.

In order to avoid noise, he couldn't run as fast as he able. He had no time to look around – he would know that terminator had noticed him the moment it shot him in the back. Reese reached the door alive, pulled, and found it unlocked. Behind it lay darkness. Without hesitation, he jumped into it and pulled the door closed.

 

-

 

Even knowing what this place was for, the actual assembly stations presented a shock that Reese hadn't seen coming. He had been too focused on staying alive long enough to blow this place up to worry about it. Then he crept across a free hanging catwalk above rows of metal skeletons and giant jars full of slow-moving liquid, and things on hangers that looked like body suits from afar and as his brain took in the visual, his stomach reacted by turning. He managed not to throw up, but as memories flooded back, it took a lot of willpower to keep going.

The endoskeletons were dressed into the skin-suits through a slit in the back, or front, or side, just big enough to fit all the parts through; parts that were disassembled to fit better and then reattached. As Reese moved on he could see that those gabs were secreting blood, and that they were sealed with a shiny substance. It probably left a scar anyway as they healed, and he acknowledged the idea behind varying the entry point. So the army couldn't just look for men with a long scar on their back.

Some of the newly coated terminators were given additional woulds to cover that scar. Some were partially burned. The memory of detached limps, and the skinning knife, and the fire in his back, became nearly overpowering. Reese wanted to run, leave this room behind him as fast as possible, but there was too much activity around him and it would have given him away. So he went slowly, and he forced himself to look, for the unlikely case that he survived and could report about this place.

Maybe he would make it back to the jeep. If he was going to get killed anyway, it didn't matter if he gave away his position with a transmission. It was so unlikely that it barely beared thinking about, but if it happened he didn't want to have missed this opportunity to give the others valuable information, and so he forced himself to look.

The terminators were all inactive, the mechanical eyes of the bare ones dark, the real eyes of the masked ones closed. Those were cloned eyes, not eyeballs torn out of the heads of prisoners. That was cloned skin, not the skin that Kyle and others had to pull of body parts. That had been used for research, for experimentation, and as material for copying. The skin growing here, closing around the machines wearing it, was identical to the skin of countless people who were dead. Reese looked at the slack, inanimated faces and wondered if those used to belong to people, too.

They had to. It made sense. And if they were and he could confirm it here, he had to do that and pass on the information – that a long lost friend might not be suddenly back; that it was probably just an enemy wearing their face. So he forced himself to look, even though his heart beat fast in horrified anticipation of recognizing a face he _knew_.

(Alex hadn't been all grown when he'd been taken. Surely he wouldn't be used for this. Would he? Reese didn't even understand how any of this cloning thing actually worked.)

He hadn't seen anyone familiar by the time he reached the end of the walkway, but then, all these faces were clean, shaved (the beards grew later, like on a real living human) and they looked dead. People looked different when they were dead. Empty. That was what these things were, right now.

They still looked that way when they moved.

The assembly line made a turn and the walkway didn't. Reese had crossed the hall and left it behind. Two small rooms later, that he had to cross with good timing to avoid detection, he found himself on a staircase leading down through bare rock.

It was notably colder here, and even going down for minutes he never encountered any kind of machine – terminator or otherwise. There were pipes running along the walls and the sound of electrical humming never got weaker. On the contrary – it grew in volume.

Eventually, the ground evened out. It was tiles here, though the walls were still rock, and uneven. Tubes and pipes and cables ran along them, some twice as thick as him, and basins were let into the ground, full of fluid. Some were covered, some weren't. Some contained what looked like water, others held oily, thick liquid that smelled very bad. Between them, Captain Rias and Sergeant Montag were searching for a safe path to the other side.

They both aimed their weapons when he approached and immediately dropped them again. Reese heard himself laugh with relief and joy when he returned Montag's embrace. “You're alive,” she noted, unnecessarily. Rias came over and clapped his shoulder, a smile briefly twisting her thin lips.

“I heard fighting,” Reese told them.

“Yeah.” Montag nodded. “Garv and Nguyen stayed behind when Garv was spotted by a terminator. We managed to get inside without them seeing us.”

“This tunnel leads to the reactor,” Rias said, as if she knew that for a fact. “This is the cooling system. We should be able to detonate the whole thing from here, and with luck, we'll even make it out the same way we came in. Did you happen to see any of the assembly line above?”

“Yes, Sir. I came through the complex.”

“Report.”

Reese did, in as few words as he could. If he died and they didn't, the report would still get out now.

A heavy steel door blocked their way three basins further in, and it wouldn't budge. All of them knew how to pick a lock, but this thing didn't have a lock, it had magnetic bolts. Behind it was the reactor – they could see it through a small window in the door.

There was no way to open it but to set an explosive. “After this goes off, I estimate about a minute before this place is swarming with terminators,” Montag said as she set it. Her face was grim; like Reese she had dared to imagine an outcome in which they lived. “We'll have to be done by then. You see those bright edges? Set your charges there, and then run.”

“Run back here,” Rias told them. “I'll detonate the passageway up to the complex. That might hold them up just long enough for us to make it back to the tunnel we came in through.”

It would also mean that she wouldn't be setting the explosives with them, and would be vulnerable to any attack that came through while running back here, as the room with the basins offered no cover at all. It was an acceptable risk, since they would all die anyway should they get trapped in the engine room.

Montag protested that, considering her greater knowledge of explosives, she should be the one collapsing the tunnel, but Rias wouldn't let her. She handed her sniper rifle to Reese, remarking that it would get in the way of her sprinting left and right around those basins, and that it wouldn't help her in the upcoming battle anyway. Reese took it wordlessly and carried it on his back as he and Montag waited her her to cross the room and signal them to get ready. It was his plasma rifle he was going to need.

They set off the detonations at the same time, the one taking out the tunnel a lot bigger than the one taking out the lock. As he hurried into the generator room, Reese couldn't help staring at the door at the other end of the room – the one that was open. Nothing would protect them from enemies coming in through there, but it was too late to worry about that. He placed his explosives and Montag did the same. They set the timer for three minutes and were about to run back the way they had come, the way that led to the exit Reese didn't know, when the tunnel Rias had blocked started to crumble under the force of continuous plasma fire.

Rias came running towards them. “They're coming through,” she yelled. “We won't make it this way.”

And suddenly that back door, where ever it might lead, was their only hope of survival. Reese and Montag turned around and ran back, still a few dozen meters ahead of their captain, and the tunnel blew free the moment they were back in the engine room.

They had two minutes left to make it out of the blast radius. Terminators were firing at them. Just a second after the tunnel was unblocked, a salve of plasma fire hit the wall right beside Montag, making her lose her balance and fall into the basin of oily liquid underneath the reactor. She managed to hold on to the edge, never fully submerging, but she was coughing so hard she couldn't climb out again.

Reese understood why when he stopped to help her. So close to the surface, the fumes emerging from the liquid were so harsh and acrid that they immediately made him cough and gag as well. He had to hold his breath to pull her out, and even so felt like the air already in his lungs was burning him up from the inside.

Montag kept gagging and coughing, barely able to move on. Understanding that she was scarcely able to see where she was going, Reese pulled her onwards towards the other door. More shots hit the wall above them, and in the doorway, Captain Rias was standing without cover, blocking the opening with her body and firing back into the smoke rolling their way. She only turned when Reese called for her from the other end of the room, from the other open door, and when she did, she dropped her weapon, because running was more important now than fighting.

She was five meters away when something hit the ground beneath her feet that was stronger than even plasma fire. Her spoon cluttered to the tile before Reese and Montag, followed by splatters of blood and flesh. Montag was wide-eyed when she slammed the heavy door shut and Reese shot at the lock, destroying it. It would buy them maybe half a minute.

They ran on, Montag moving under her own power now. The flashlights mounted to their shoulders lit the way and Montag took the lead, following a net of tunnels to where she hoped it would merge with their way in. They could see gray daylight falling against the walls ahead of them when the generator blew up, filling the tunnels with fire. A corner protected them from the worst of the blast.

The world shook for good long time after that. They waited until the firestorm had died down, then they hurried outside. Snow was falling. The sky was gray and the wind had died. Silence lay beyond the ringing in their ears. Two kilometers from here the jeep was waiting for them.

Nothing else was waiting outside. No terminator had made it out after them. No machine rose from the burning wreck of the factory. Inside there, something was probably still moving, trying to make its way out here, and they had to be gone before it did, but right now they were alone. They had accomplished their mission. The war would be a little bit easier thanks to their effort. Right this moment, it was hard to feel any kind of triumph.

A burned out crater and bloodstains in the snow marked the place where Garv and Nguyen had died. They walked past it into the snow covered town, seeking cover between the ruins. Montag was still coughing a lot, but she tried to keep it down, and it was gradually getting better. Reese found it easier to breathe out here, the icy air in his lungs a relief for once, after the fumes, and the sprint through the tunnel that had seemed to set them on fire. He still felt a little ditzy from lack of oxygen, and Montag still had trouble with her balance. By the time they reached their vehicle, they were both breathing easier.

But Montag was still affected, mumbling something about feeling sick, and so Reese took the wheel. Garv had had the keys, but he knew how to hotwire the engine – Wilkins had taught him at the same time Andrew Jackson and Naya Rhodes had taught him in one action-filled day how to drive a car. Not hitting obstacles was the most important lesson, and the only one that mattered now. Reese sped out of there, finding paths between the ruins that the jeep only barely fit through, and going only marginally slower than he would have had he been chasing an enemy or fleeing one. He couldn't say for certain that the latter wasn't the case. And now that the two of them were still alive, the mission wouldn't be over until they were back with Perry and had reported to him all they had learned.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poem John (incorrectly) quoted is "Love Is Not All" by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
> 
> The full and correct version can be found [ here](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/love-not-all-sonnet-xxx/).
> 
> The lines Kyle quoted are from "The Ballard of the White Horse" by G.K. Chesterton.


	32. 2028 - 2/3

Justin Perry arrived at the headquarters of the army with a truck full of useful data, weird data, and not nearly as many soldiers as he had been hoping for. He had lost four of the ten men and women he had led into the underground facility to the west, where they had walked into a trap five hundred feet into enemy territory. Of Mildred's team of five, only two had made it back, and Mildred had not been among them. The news hadn't truly reached Justin yet; not really. When he thought about it, he mostly felt numb, and he also felt the realization that another of his oldest friends was gone lie in wait somewhere inside him, like a bomb ready to go off.

He knew he needed to get that over with, but every time his thoughts strayed in the direction of how they were winning more often than they lost now, and how he had dared to hope that those he had left would see a world without war again, his mind shied away from it. He thought about how it was thanks to people like Mildred sacrificing themselves that they had a chance of winning this war, but that thought didn't hold nearly the same impact. It was just an observation.

Naya sat on the bench of the truck, staring out into the landscape they were leaving behind, without saying a single word the entire trip. It was just them now, and Andrew, who wasn't here because the machines had fucked up his leg too much to go out into the field on it ever again. Sometimes Justin was grateful for that. This was one of those times.

They arrived at the base before Connor came back from his own mission. As always, they tiredly filled into the barracks provided for them. Connor not being here gave Justin the chance to rest for a little bit before he had to give his report. He spend that time lying on his back on a cot, staring at the ceiling, until Naya handed him a bowl of food.

He had no appetite, but his body demanded food anyway, and he was too experienced in this life to deny it when it was offered to him. What they got was a little bit of roasted flesh – rat, by the taste of it – and a bit of greenish mash that he couldn't identify and that tasted like a mix of nothing and cardboard. By their standard, it wasn't half-bad.

They weren't alone in the guest quarters. Commander Mitchell's division was coming through here, stopping for two days for rest and provisions before moving on towards Arizona, where Colonel Maquati was in need of reinforcement. They were traveling without Mitchell herself, who had lost a leg and an arm to a mine a week ago and stayed behind in the nearest bunker. It wasn't certain if she would make it, Major Esperanza, her second in command, told Justin. He accepted the information with a nod. He'd never met Mitchell in person.

The group had suffered some more losses, but was still more than forty people strong. Had Justin not suffered losses as well, there wouldn't have been enough room here for everyone.

The group was also loud. They had been here for a day, had slept off the worst of the exhaustion, and some of them appeared to be bored, and eager to kill some time with crude remarks and practical jokes. Not all of them – most were quiet, keeping their voices down when they talked, or busy dealing with their equipment. Many threw annoyed glances at the loud ones, and at one point someone told them to keep it down, which immediately resulted in a surprisingly aggressive reply resulting in a fight that Esperanza had to break up.

“Lots of new guys,” he said quietly when he returned to where he had been talking to Justin. “Recruited from armed scavengers, never went through any kind of training, and many of them are assholes, to put it plainly. A settlement near Sacramento has been dissolved, and I guess these guys joined the army because the alternative was starving. The have no discipline, no common sense, and in battle they are quite happy to keep to the back and let everyone else catch the bullets for them.” He sounded frustrated. Justin looked at the guys that were already getting loud again and wondered how he would have dealt with them. He had had recruits who joined their fights for selfish reasons, with no intention to actually be helpful, once or twice during his time as general, but never this many at once.

Kicking them all out at once would weaken their numbers too much. Perhaps threatening them with being kicked out would already do the job. It had worked before.

A voice in the back of his head pointed out that they would only get worse if they called the bluff, and he sighed. He didn't want to deal with this. He wanted to leave this problem to Esperanza, who was obviously frustrated, overwhelmed, and not used to dealing with command yet. Personally and right now, he just wanted those assholes to shut up.

Obnoxious laughter rang through the hall, so sudden and explosive that he flinched. Usually he appreciated any sign of joy and positive thinking, but right now it pissed him off. His own men were tired, some were trying to sleep off injuries or mild infections. The moment he put on his cap with the markings of a general, stood to his full height, and started walking over to the most annoying group, they fell silent. Good. Maybe intimidation would be all it took.

His eyes fell on the open door. He looked down the corridor and saw another open door down it. All the doors here were open unless there was an actual necessity for them to be closed. Which meant that the loud voices traveled down there and probably disturbed the members of Connor's team who had returned with him and were just as much in need of rest.

Just as he was looking, Ava Jan poked her head out of the door, her expression dark. Justin walked over to her to let her know he had taken care of the noise for the moment, and she nodded her thanks. “Sergeant Montag is sick,” she told him. “Headache, fever. All that noise is really getting to her. Those morons should know better than to make such a racket here. We've got other rooms, if they want to be annoying.”

“They're new,” Justin informed her, deciding not to go into details. “They know better now.”

Just as he said it, someone in the guest quarters yelled an insult at someone named Boris through the hall. Justin straightened his shoulders, turned on the spot, and briskly walked back to do some yelling of his own.

  


-

  


By the time John returned from his mission, Perry and the others were already back. He was relieved to hear that both Kyle and Ava had made it back unhurt, and upset to learn of the ones his team had lost. He hadn't know McStevens all that well – the man had only just joined them a month ago, but he'd been a good soldier and a very good driver. He'd been a race driver as a young man, before the war – or so he had told John. Others had told him that McStevens had been a getaway driver as a teenager who'd been on the way to jail when the bombs fell. He didn't know what was true and frankly didn't care. All he knew for certain was that the man had left his safe position by the truck to help out Perry in a tight situation, and now he was dead.

As for Garv, he'd been with John for years. He heard about how he'd been killed, along with this kid from Justin's division who was barely twenty, from Ava, who had heard it from Kyle and Clara. Lot's of heroes that day.

John would have to get their direct report later. For now he had to get everyone together and inform them of the discoveries he had made during his own mission. Urgent business. Everything else had to wait.

He chose the conference hall, because it offered room for everyone. His personal team wasn't all that big, but there were the soldiers who had come with Justin, and the ones stationed at this base without being directly under John's command. Usually, they secured the parameters or were deployed for missions that would keep them away for no longer then three days, but this time, John would need them to help out. Some of them, anyway. Most of them.

If it went wrong, this base would be left mostly unprotected. But if they did nothing, the protection it had right now wouldn't be enough.

The room was filled almost to full capacity. Jeanette was there, in the second row, and already John had to face the decision of whether he took her along or left her here along with the last defense of the base. Kyle in the first row, to the right, along with the rest of John's team. Clara wasn't present at all – John noted it but didn't have time to dwell on it before he started his presentation on what they were dealing with.

The back wall of the room was stark white and thus a good screen for projections. Right now. Hernandez was handing the projector that was throwing enlarged photos onto it, taken while they'd been lying in wait. They showed low buildings, not very large. Some showed seemingly nothing at all, scattered with machines. The soldiers in the room looked at the pictures and started mumbling among each other. They recognized the patters of those machines, and they recognized the landscape.

“We thought the new bastion the machines established at the Burned Village was a coincidence, merely an attempt to gain more strength in this area,” John explained. “But upon checking the area, we found more bastions around this base. Literally _around_ this base. They have been created without our notice, existing mostly underground. Few show any kind of presence on the surface, and they aren't heavily populated by killer bots. But the fact remains that we are surrounded.”

“Why are we still alive if Skynet knows where we are?” Ava asked.

“They don't know,” Hernandez informed her. “We know that because we are still alive.”

“It seems that Skynet has figured out the rough area of the base, but not where exactly it is. It won't strike unless it has the exact position, to make sure no one can escape. That's why it's drawing a circle around us, pulling it tighter and tighter until we're found. Now, that circle is more than ten kilometers in diameter so unless we're very careless, we've got a grace period before they got us. Unfortunately, we're not in the dead center of it. It's hard to say how fast the machines will operate, but they will probably hit the first communication lines in less than a week, and from there it'll be over very soon.”

More murmurs. No one liked to hear that they had less than a week to live.

“So what's the plan?” Justin Perry asked.

“We strike first,” John told him and everyone else. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Justin echoed. “How do we do that without giving away our position with a thousand people running in all different directions from a common center? Even if Skynet misses half of us, it'll be easy to deduct where we came from.”

“Guess what – we thought of that,” John promised with a quick smile. “And we have back doors.”

They did – more than most people knew. After the tunnels in San Diego had saved them, John had plenty of those build in this bunker as well, while making sure no one but the people who'd build each one and a few selected others knew exactly where they were. It was a precaution they hadn't needed until now, but he would rather give them all away by sending his army out through them than needing them to escape again.

The tunnels, he explained now, would spit them out in different directions, far from the base. One even emerged into a net of other tunnels that led past the ring of machines tightening around them. John made the decision to not use that, in case they did need to escape after all, and not to use those to the west, hopefully throwing Skynet's calculations if it found out where they came up from underground and deducted that the base was probably somewhere in the center of that.

“Are we going to evacuate?” Tyson asked from the crowd.

“Not if we can avoid it,” John told them. “Establishing another base as HQ would take a lot of time that we don't have, and there is no place to do so that is nearly as conveniently placed as this one. So we're going to keep it if we can. If we manage to destroy all those bastions Skynet had created around before they have a chance to strike, it'll take month for the machines to come close here again. Fortunately those places don't carry a lot of bots and terminators, since the machines were trying to stay unnoticed.”

“So we have to strike before they realize we know they are there,” Perry observed.

“Exactly.”

The rest of the discussion, now that the basic facts had been covered, consisted of outlining the general plan of attack. Afterward, most of the soldiers were send on to prepare, and only the leaders of the different troops were kept to discuss the details.

Ava was one of those team leaders. John was going to be another, and Hernandez as well. He would assign Jeanette to his friend's team, he decided, when it became obvious that he had no good reason not to take her along for this mission, and that she might act too rashly trying to prove herself if she was on his. Kyle could come with him, but John assigned him to Ava's group when she told him that Clara wouldn't be able to come, being too sick with fever to leave the bed right now.

There was one more man down from Justin's companions, due to a leg injury that kept him from moving quickly. Still, they had plenty of men. John would have preferred them having more, and would have ordered a few nearby divisions to come help, but having to leave tomorrow, they had no time for that.

He'd have to set at least one group on keeping the machines from collecting near this base again, though. From now on, life would be different. They had been under constant threat before, but now that threat was a lot more real. And they would have to constantly fight to keep the enemy from their gates. All they could hope for was that they would manage to hold them off until Skynet was defeated for good.

One more year, John though. One and a half at best. They were so close.

“Give me something positive,” he finally turned to Justin. “How did your mission go?”

“People died, Sir,” Justin replied matter-of-factly. “Other than that, it was a success. We got what we wanted. I'd like to go back there, though, after this shit here is over, and have another look at that facility – or what's left of it. There was something weird going on there, and I don't like not knowing what.”

“More details, if you please,” John said impatiently, and trying not to sound eager.

What he heard next was exactly the kind of positive thing he had been hoping for, though Justin had no way of knowing that.

They had found a collection of rooms deep underground, full of alien machinery, large generators that gave off strange emissions, and an incredible amount of cooling liquid. They didn't know what to make of it, and it didn't help that the complex had been rigged to explode briefly after they entered it, leaving them barely enough time to look around before they had to flee, but Justin was convinced that there was something big going on there. Something that generated an awful lot of energy.

“The readings we got were pretty unstable,” he said finally. “So we're sure that whatever they are doing there isn't quite past its testing stage yet. But whatever it is, it can't be good for us.”

“Nothing the bots do can be good for us,” Hernandez pointed out.

“We'll keep an eye out for it,” John decided. “You're right, they wouldn't invest that many resources if they didn't plan something big, and if they gave this place up so readily, that means they exhausted their options there and will try again elsewhere. And when they do, I want to know about it. Now tell me about the skin-factory.”

“It was large, from what we heard, and now it's gone, Sir,” Ava reported. “There were hundreds of terminators in production, all with different faces, although they all have roughly the same body type. Fortunately Skynet isn't very creative there. However, Reese raised the interesting point that since all that skin is cloned from people who once lived, the faces might be as well, so that could become a problem if anyone's old friends return from the grave.”

“That is a good point,” John agreed. He had considered that idea before. So far, nothing of the kind had happened – at least not to anyone who had a chance to tell someone about it. “Did the faces there repeat? How much variety did they have?”

“You'd have to ask Reese,” Justin said, and Ava nodded. “He's the only one who saw the inside of this thing.”

So they called in Kyle, who looked like they had pulled him out of bed. A bit surprising, so briefly after their meeting, and so close to an important mission, but perhaps he had simply made use of what time for rest he had. He looked like he needed it, anyway.

But his voice was clear when he made his report – standing close to Perry, keeping his eyes on John. He hadn't seen any repetition in the faces, he said, but it was hard to tell because of the light and the fact that the figures all lacked expression, which made them all look the same in a way. They also lacked any kind of hair, including eyebrows, immediately after getting their skin-and-flesh-suit. Kyle had seen the beginning of facial and head hair on models that looked like they had been hanging there for a while.

What Kyle told them about the openings for entering the skeletons was upsetting. It would have been easier if they had all had a big zipper on the back for that.

“I saw some tanks further down, in a row, about two meters long,” Kyle continued. “I couldn't look inside, but I saw a endoskeleton get lowered into one, and Sergeant Montag has speculated that perhaps they are working on growing the biological material directly on the machine, leaving it with no scars at all.”

That was even more upsetting. And it made sense. And it probably needed longer than the other method, so there would be fewer of those flawless T-800s around.

It turned especially upsetting when John wondered what purpose Skynet would even need those for. It wasn't like guys with perfect, unblemished skin didn't stand out in _this_ world.

Kyle couldn't give reliable information about the size of the complex, except that it was big. He had gone through one production hall, but was certain there was at least one other. Even with this factory gone, and even if it had been the only one, how many terminators were out there already?

He gave more description of the clothes the terminator guarding the place was wearing and voiced his theory that they took clothes from the prisoners murdered in the camps, which was very likely. He told them that the terminator had been smelling like a real person and had been sweating ever so slightly at the neck – an information that didn't surprise John but visibly unsettled Justin and Ava, even though they had known in theory that it would be so.

In the end, Kyle suggested dispatching a team to the ruins at first opportunity to get an idea of the size and the functions before the machines had time to clear away anything useful. He also volunteered for it, which made sense, as he had the best knowledge of the layout. John agreed, then dissolved the meeting, telling everyone to gather their respective teams and prepare them for the upcoming battle in detail. He stopped Kyle when he saw him sway ever so slightly on the way out.

“What's wrong?” he asked, placing a hand on the younger man's forehead and trying to ignore the fact that the sudden contact made him flinch. It may have been the coldness of the touch that caused it, because Kyle's skin was unnaturally warm. “You're running a fever.”

Justin and Ava stopped by the door, and Justin looked at the soldier formerly under his command like a mildly disappointed parent.

“How bad is it, Soldier?” John asked.

“I'm still assessing that, Sir,” Kyle replied, standing a little straighter.

“You just almost fell over. Do you honestly think you'll be any use to us in battle?”

“I might be better after some rest, Sir.” Kyle didn't even blink at that. And he was right. He might be better later. For now, John had to trust that he wouldn't come along in a state where he was a liability rather than an asset. And he had to trust Ava to kick him out if she felt he wasn't in fighting condition. So he dismissed them for the moment and activated his comm unit to call in the five men and women he would personally lead into battle tomorrow.

  


-

  


In the end, Reese didn't get the chance to find out if he would be better after a few hours of sleep, because Captain Jan kicked him out of her team before the pre-mission meeting was even over. Throughout her explanations and directions, he had to struggle more and more to follow her words. His headache, that had started mildly just after they arrived in this base, became almost unbearable, and his movements felt uncoordinated in a way that took him back into his his childhood and the tunnels underneath the camp. It even seemed like the barcode tattoo burned into his arm was hurting again.

When Ava stopped talking long enough to send him away, he didn't even have the energy left to protest.

The corridors were deserted. Obviously. All the soldiers were in the meeting rooms with their team leaders, learning about their missions, with the exception of a few guys who would move on later today, as backup for another division that needed them more urgently than they needed extra fighters here. Reese only remembered they were there when they heard unfamiliar voices down the hall with the sleeping quarters of the soldiers. In his slightly dazed state, it took him a little while to realize that the voices came from further down the hall than the guest room. They came from the two connected rooms Reese shared with the other members of Connor's team.

They had no place being there. While the doors were never closed, let alone locked when someone was in there, it was generally accepted that no one entered a room that was not theirs. No one touched the stuff on or under a cot that was not theirs. Reese felt confusion and irritation as he slowly neared the room, then he remembered Montag and thought that maybe these men had gone there to keep her company or help her with something.

But he had seen her just an hour earlier. She'd been deeply asleep and very pale. A part of him wanted to be glad she wasn't alone in her weak and miserable state, but something rubbed him the wrong way about this. If those guys were in there without her inviting them, it felt like such an invasion.

It was instinct, shaped by growing up in a world where caution meant survival, that made him slow down and sneak up to the room quietly. He heard the voices clearly now, could tell apart two different ones. They were loud and sounded amused. It didn't fit Montag being sick, didn't sound like they cared. Already, their voices were making Reese's head hurt worse, and he had difficulty making out what they were even saying.

The door was half closed. Reese could barely see inside, but that meant that they wouldn't see him either. “She's out,” someone said. “Probably won't even twitch.”

And another said, “How boring.”

And then a third voice he hadn't heard before hissed, “Not so loud! Someone's gonna hear!”

A shiver ran through Reese. He still couldn't see them, suspected they were behind the wall to the other room, but he didn't need to see or hear any more to know what to do. Activating his comm unit, he said quietly, “There are people in the barracks, about to assault Montag. At least three men. I'm going to stop them. Will need back up.” He didn't wait for a reply but went in there, knowing there wasn't any time to waste. He had no gun – no one carried on in the bunker unless on watch duty. All he had was the shock of his presence and the hope that it would be enough.

He already knew it wouldn't be by the time he turned around the corner. Three men (not more) looked up in surprise, one of them sitting on the edge of the stock bed Montag was sleeping in. She wasn't moving, even though the stranger was in the process of pulling off her sweat-soaked shirt. “Get away from her,” Reese said with all the authority he could muster, and while the man did that, he could tell the moment a slow grin started to spread on the bearded face that his presence alone wasn't enough to scare them away.

Rushing through the room towards the one next to Montag was like rushing backwards through time. He was a lot taller and stronger now, but there were three of them, and other than Laina, Montag would be no help here. Just like then, Kyle had no chance of actually winning a fight, and just like then he had no chance but to try. Then he crashed into the man and the moment shattered into the present and the sensation of falling that seemed to go on for longer than the actual fall.

He landed on top of the assailant and immediately drove his fist into the man's face. His punch was lacking strength. Everything felt like rubber, but he had the upper hand here, and perhaps would have made it against this one opponent.

But strong hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him away, a kick to the torso drove the air from his lungs, and for a while all he could do was curl up on the floor and try to protect his head.

Eventually, an opening: as one of them raised one feet for another kick, Kyle grabbed the one he was standing on, throwing him off balance. As he crushed to the floor, Kyle got up again, throwing himself at him, and again the other two were there before he could do much damage. All he could do was try to hold on and keep them distracted until the others got here.

Where they even coming? How long had it been?

He was still wondering if anyone had even received his call when he was thrown hard on his back and a hand gripped his hair and slammed his head against the ground. The flashing pain took his vision, and he managed to piece together the words spoken around him only seconds after he'd heard them.

“We have to get outta here,” one said. “He could have called for help before he came. Look, he's got his comm with him.”

The comm was removed and Kyle heard a crunching sound. “Don't be such a pussy. If there was anyone coming, he wouldn't have been stupid enough to barge in here alone.”

Yes, he would have been exactly that stupid. Because there had been no time. And now a hand closed around his throat and another started tearing at his pants, and the voice continued, “You were the one who thought she was too boring without a struggle.”

And then there were some minutes (Hours? Seconds?) in which Kyle desperately fought to throw the weight off his chest, and push away the hands grabbing him, and then there were more voices yelling, and a gunshot, closely followed by another.

“Fuck,” someone cursed, and it sounded a lot like Hernandez.

Kyle rolled onto his stomach and then tried to push himself up. Someone grabbed his arm and he pulled away, nearly lost his balance, and finally stumbled to his feet. Finally he took in the two bodies lying in growing pools of blood on the floor, and Connor with a gun in his hand, looking furious, and Montag, Clara, still lying on her bed as if all of this had never happened. Kyle sank to his knees again, but he managed to stumble over to her first, and then he knelt beside her bed and put a hand to her face while everyone was talking at once.

“She'd dead,” he muttered. He wasn't even certain yet, but he had to say it.

No. He did know. He had seen enough dead bodies to know. Silence fell around him, then someone turned Clara over and took her pulse. “Shit,” they said. “She's already cold.” Kyle had to think of dead bodies in the snow.

“Come on, Soldier,” someone else (John?) said next to him, and puled him to his feet. Reese looked down at Montag, all that long, dirty hair and the peaceful face because she hadn't known she was dying. He thought he was standing but it didn't feel like it. It felt like falling again, the room swimming around him, bile rising in his throat but never making it out. He wasn't sure if he was breathing. If he was falling, he wasn't sure he'd ever hit the ground.

  


-

  


“Shit.” John barely had time to catch Kyle before he could hit the edge of the bed. There was blood in his hair and bruises on his face, but he suspected from the heat he could feel even through the clothes that that was not the reason for him passing out. Without thinking, John lifted the young soldier into his arms, ready to carry him to the infirmary, when Justin stepped into his way.

“Let me,” he said, and while John accepted that he was better suited for the job – he was taller, more muscular – he still had to remind himself of that before he handed Kyle over.

With a last look at Clara, who had been down with a fever and was now dead, they hurried out of the room.

Most of the others stayed behind. They needed to clean up, and find out what exactly had killed Sergeant Montag. There was a chance that it had been her assailants, but John had seen the body and was frighteningly certain that she had been dead for more than the few minutes that had passed since Kyle had called for back up.

The clinic was busy. There was a queue outside, but the people made room when John passed, followed by Perry with Kyle in his arms, and John didn't care if this gave new fuel for the most ridiculous rumor ever. Kate was in the middle of treating someone, and so were her colleagues Giselle and Jim, on the other examination table in the room, and he could see through the open door to the other room that the beds were taken. But when they barged in, Kate gently and professionally told the man with the wounded leg (shrapnel, John's mind provided unbidden) sitting on her table to move aside and wait for Giselle to have time for him. He did without protest. John forgot he existed the moment he was out of his field of vision.

“What happened?” Kate asked, starting to remove Kyle's clothes, and John noted with fury that some of it was already half off. Kate noted it as well, and threw him a questioning look.

“He got in a fight with two men who were assaulting Sergeant Montag,” John explained. “But he was sick already. He's burning up.”

“I notice that,” Kate confirmed with the barest hint of sarcasm. “What about Montag? Is she alright?”

“She's dead.”

Now Kate looked up sharply, and John continued, “She was sick, too. Hernandez is checking if those assholes killed her, but I don't think they did.”

Kate never stopped working – by now they had uncovered the darkening bruises forming all over Kyle's lean torso - but there was a change in her posture, and her tone of voice when she said, “A virus?”

John had considered it. He'd debated bringing Kyle here, when he'd seen how crowded it was, but if it was something contagious, they all had it already.

“I don't think so,” Justin unexpectedly quipped in. “They were on a mission together and Montag fell into some chemicals that fucked with her breathing, although she seemed to recover from it well enough. Maybe this is a delayed effect of that stuff.”

“What?” The words had barely registered in John's brain when his body was already shoving Justin backwards, against the wall. “They were exposed to unknown chemicals, and now she's dead, and you never even told us?” he yelled.

“Keep it the fuck down!” Kate snapped from somewhere behind him. “This is neither the place nor the time. Gina, Robby, get me the tub from the backroom and fill it up, cold. Everyone else, get out of here until we know this isn't contagious.”

At least one person who was still acting professionally. John watched as Giselle and Jim herded all the patients out into the corridor and closed the door to the other room, with the bedridden patients. “I'd thought you knew,” Justin said beside him, rubbing his throat. “About Montag. I don't know if Reese was exposed as well, but if he pulled her out, that seems likely.”

“Let's hope that's really it, else Skynet won't have to bother attacking us right now,” Kate said. John went over to her, helped her get off the rest of Kyle's clothes. He was completely limp through all of it, and his skin was so hot it was frightening.

Montag couldn't have been that bad, if they didn't take her to medical, and then she was dead within an hour.

Gina and a young boy John presumed was Robby came back with a large, sturdy plastic tub the medics sometimes used to wash patients. The started to fill it up with a tube attached to the faucet in the corner. One it was half filled, Kate slider her arms under Kyle's shoulders and John took his feet, and together they lifted him up without much effort. He wasn't very heavy, and his body was covered in a ridiculous amount of scars.

He started thrashing the moment the put him in the water, but there was little force behind it and John mostly just saw it as a sign that he was still alive. He could sympathize, too – the water was icy, and it wasn't like the bunker was particularly well heated in the first place.

“Three guys,” Justin suddenly said, when they were wrapping Kyle into blankets a few minutes later.

“What?” Kate asked. She was fumbling with Kyle's sodding wet hair – it was long and messy, held together by a short ponytail that Kate was trying hard to undo. Eventually she gave up in frustration and just cut it off with a pair of scissors, leaving the hair just as messy but a little more comfortable to lie on.

“There were three guys attacking them,” Justin pointed out. “Reese said so on the comm.”

John remembered. “He might have been mistaken.”

“Or one ran off.”

That was something John didn't want to deal with right now. However, he wanted to have a potential rapist and murderer get away and hang out with the general population even less. “I'll take care of it.”

  


-

  


In the end, John only had to take care of ascertaining that there really was a third man to worry about. Once he did, the man was easily found, thanks to his bloodied nose. John dumped the responsibility for dealing with him on Major Esperanza, after letting the man know how displeased he was that he had brought this kind of scum to their base. He did acknowledge that they couldn't really choose their fellow rebels carefully – or at all. But according to Perry it had been obvious that the new ones in Esperanza's division were troublemakers and untrustworthy. He should have reigned them in or, failing that, kicked them out.

Now the Major had to deal with a would-be rapist John wanted off his hands, and while John wasn't going to make any decisions regarding the man's fate himself, he was going to check how Esperanza deal with him, and it would better be in a way he approved of.

The whole thing, from Kyle's call to walking out of the guest quarters and away from a very unhappy Major and a bloody-nosed former soldier surrounded by people who didn't like him very much, had taken two hours. John didn't return to medical, much as he wanted to. He returned to the team he was going to lead into battle in a few hours and resumed his mission briefing.

He did drop in at Kate's clinic before they left, in the brief moment when everything that needed to be said had been said and everyone just had to get ready. There was a little time for rest, but hardly anyone would get any sleep, or try to. John checked on Kyle, who was still out and still burning up, though no longer so badly that Kate felt the need to dump him in pneunomia-inducing ice water to make it better. He was laid up in the back room, the one they usually reserved for the hopeless cases, and John had a second of near-panic before Kate told him that there simply hadn't been room anywhere else. Kyle was lying on a cot because the only two beds available where next door and taken, but Kate had piled an impressive about on woolen blankets on top of it to make it more comfortable. In the reception room, Giselle and Jim were back to handling patients, after they had all agreed that there was probably no risk of contagion. It had to be the chemical. The nature of which they didn't know. All they could do was take care of Kyle and hope he hadn't gotten enough of a dose to kill him.

Meanwhile, everyone in medical was frantically trying to work through their line of patients before all the wounded from the upcoming attack came in. When John left, Kate was just starting to talk to a young man that looked familiar. Only after a moment John realized that it was the man with the shrapnel wound in his leg whose treatment they had interrupted earlier. And only when he spoke did John realize that it wasn't a young man, but a very young woman; with cropped hair, bony, face haggard. In the light of this revelation, she looked no older than Jeanette. He heard just enough on the way out to understand she had gotten hurt undoing traps in the Wasteland.

An hour later, he led his team of five through a tunnel that would take them close to one of the machines' stations. It's wasn't a strong one; with the element of surprise on their side, they managed to take it out within a minute and move on. Each team had to eradicate three of them, so they had two more to go, plus whatever they had to pick up for other teams that couldn't complete their objective.

The second station was about fifteen minutes away, at a fast pace. It went without much effort as well, but this time the machines had a chance to fight back. They didn't hit anyone, thanks to the cover the environment provided, and the swiftness of the team's attack, but others were not so lucky. Reports came in, of wounded and fallen. At this point, they were no more than that: a sharing of information. Later, they would be more, for some.

In the third battle, Corporal Ryan was wounded, but not so bad that he couldn't continue fighting. John thought briefly about Kate and the work waiting for her. Already they had lost about a quarter of their comrades, many of them beyond help. As they fought to wipe out their third group of machines, John began to wonder if the ease of the fist two hadn't been on purpose, because this one was tough. Not only were the machines waiting for them, they were waiting underground a good bit before their bastion and John's men nearly missed them.

While the third one felt like a trap, the fourth one was one beyond the shadow of a doubt. John and his men had to team up with Herdandez' team because he had lost three soldiers to a mine (not Jeannie, John could still hear her voice in the comms, it hadn't been Jeannie) and didn't have enough left to take out his last one. The field before it was clear, empty, and decades of experience made John keep his soldiers back and tell Hernandez to do the same. A charge thrown blindly into the emptiness quickly revealed that not only had the machines been hiding under the snow, they had been hiding in two lines and would have had them surrounded the moment they crossed the first one.

During the battle, John had to force himself to focus on the enemies, instead of looking for his daughter all the time – something that could him killed, and anyone else who relied in his watchfulness. There was a reason why he hadn't wanted her on his own team.

He still looked around once there was a pause in the fighting, and that's how he spotted the injured soldier coming towards them through the smoke. He arrived, dragging himself on a lame leg, just in time to save Dellmare from a bot rising behind him. John didn't recognize him; he had to be relatively new, or one of Justin's. The resulting explosion set the man's jacket on fire, and he tore it off with a quick movement and started stomping it in the snow.

A figure, barely more than an outline in the smog but still clearly recognizable as Hernandez, moved over to help as soon as the final machine was taken down, and John, seeing the methodical movement and the long, straight scar moving all the way across the man's strong ribcage, aimed his plasma gun and fired.

The man went down in a shower of sparks, and then everyone ran before he exploded. “Damn,” Hernandez said, a minute later, when they were all looking at the smoldering wreck. “That was a good one. Good trick, fighting the bots with us. I never would've noticed in time.” And then they were all expressing how good it was that John Connor had a sixth sense when it came to the machines, and how they couldn't fool him.

John ordered them all to clean up and then return to the base, and as he met Jeanette's eyes over the defeated terminator, he didn't tell them that he'd had a pretty strong feeling this was a machine when he fired – but he hadn't known for sure.

  


-

  


It was almost a day after the first wounded soldiers came in that Kate had a chance to go back to her family's room, and even then it was only to change out of her shirt that had been thoroughly soaked by an open artery a while ago and to pop some caffein pills. She found John sitting on the edge of the bed, a pile of papers spread out around him, tapping the end of a pen against his knee as he was thinking. Notes were scrawled all over the print outs and maps that surrounded him. The army really needed him to survive, Kate thought, because no one else would ever be able to read that.

He was sweaty, stubbly, and seemed to have reached that point of exhaustion that crossed into mania. His eyes were too bright. Kate suspected that he had only come back to be base half an hour ago – an hour at best. The battle was long over, but there was always more to do.

She'd known he hadn't been hurt, and that was all she had had the time to care about.

“You look like shit,” he noted as she dropped he bloody shirt into the bucket by the door and reached for a new one. It wasn't clean either, and it wasn't something she'd usually wear for surgery, but it would have to do.

The blood-soaked fabric hit the bottom of the bucket with a wet, heavy sound that took her back years and years, to Melissa's blood and her little girls coming in to ask why she was crying. “Where's Casey?” she wondered, then realized that John had no way of knowing that if their son had been gone by the time he arrived. Predictably, he shrugged.

Casey was older now than his sisters had been when Melissa died.

Kate had asked him to remain in here, because with all the wounded coming back, he would just be in the way. He had nodded and said nothing, and Kate found that she had hoped he'd offer his help. She would have refused it, because this was not a good situation for training someone and she had enough helpers here, but it would have been nice of him to offer.

Lou would have, But then, at his age, Lou already knew what she was doing.

Now he wasn't here and Kate didn't have any clue where he'd gone, but he had turned eight a few days ago (as she only realized now, but then, he probably hadn't realized it either) and knew this place, so she had to assume he was safe.

The next time she saw John was another six hours later, and her clothes were stained with blood again, but not so badly that she had to get them off at once. Instead she pulled on a heavy coat over them and left the bunker through the side door closest to the clinic, desperate for air that didn't smell of burned flesh.

John was there as well, smoking a cigarette – something Kate hadn't seen him do in years. She suspected that he needed something for his hands to do more than he needed the nicotine.

If he was surprised to see her here, he didn't show it. Kate wasn't surprised to see him, even though it had been a long time since they'd both been out of the bunker at the same time and in the same place. They hadn't moved bases for many years now, and the last time they'd done that had been the last time they'd met underneath the sky. Long, long ago.

“I found Casey,” she said. “When I checked on the patients in my regular clinic. He's helping Lou and Chrissy take care of everyone.” When she closed her eyes she could see then clearly: Christina with her jet-black hair framing a pale, elfish face that barely ever saw the sun and only seemed to smile when Lou was acting foolish, checking the bandages on Corporal Fey's legs. Lou, whose small frame looked almost compact next to her fine-boned friend, her own jet-black hair held back by a head band, her hand's expertly checking Kyle's pulse and temperature, and finally Casey, whose hair color finally had settled on a dirty brown and who was rushing to bring his sister a cloth and a bucket of cold water to help with Kyle's fever. All the adults had been asleep or unconscious and in that quiet, still environment their three substitute nurses had looked like kids playing hospital, rather than kids actually manning a hospital.

She opened her eyes and the image disappeared. “The hall we cleared for the wounded is full. We had to move some of the less dramatic cases to the barracks.”

“How many died after coming back?”

“Twenty-three,” Kate said. “At least four more won't make it.”

John nodded without much of an expression. “We'll move all the civilians out of here,” he told her. “Back to San Diego, unless they have somewhere else to go.”

Kate turned that thought over in her head. Assessed what that meant for them. “Define civilians.”

“People not in the army.”

“Like me?” She didn't even try to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“And not involved in essential tasks.”

“I see. Who does that leave, then?”

“Not many,” John admitted. “Young children, mostly. And those permanently injured or sick in a way that keeps them from fighting or heavy lifting.”

“You mean those we left here so far because sending them across the wasteland would probably get half of them killed?”

He didn't bat an eye. “Exactly. At this point, they'll be safer there than here. It'll be a while before Skynet tries to get us here again, but it will, and we might not notice in time then. From now on, we can only hope that we will get them before they'll get us.”

Kate shivered. “So it'll get worse before it gets better?”

“Isn't that always the case?” He took another drag from his cigarette, let it drop and lit a new one. “What about our kids?” he asked. “Jeannie will stay here anyway, but Lou and Casey both fall into the group of people we'd send away.”

Kate had been wondering that since he brought it up. She always appreciated Lou's help, but most of he time, she didn't _need_ it. As for Casey, having grown up relatively sheltered, he wouldn't be able to take care of himself and stay safe without them. There was no one among the ones about to leave Kate would trust to watch out for him, unless Lou went as well. “We'll ask Louisa,” she suggested. “If she wants to leave, we'll send Casey with her. If she stays here, so does he.”

There would be plenty of things for Lou to do here, but no more children to educate, which was where her true passion lay. This could go either way. Kate tried not to analyze which option terrified her more.

“That seems sensible,” John agreed. He took a long drag from his cigarette, then dropped the rest of it into the snow where it joined the other one.

“Careful,” Kate warned, half-joking. “That's worth three hot meals elsewhere, what you're wasting there.”

“Well, yeah.” John said as he stomped the glowing remains out. “Perks of the privileged.” He turned to go back inside. “I shot two men yesterday,” he told her. “When we came in to help Montag, and they were about to rape Kyle. They weren't armed.”

Kate looked up at the overcast sky. She longed for the sun. “I see.”

“I keep preaching how precious every life is, how we should go out of our way to save people, even if it's inconvenient. Between the five of us, we could have subdue them without much trouble.”

The sun sometimes came through the clouds now. Very rarely. Kate kept hearing about it, but she'd never been outside when it happened. “What did the others say to that?”

“Nothing. No one said one damn thing. They cleaned up while Justin and I brought Kyle to you. I think they were glad.”

Kate didn't come out here nearly often enough. The history books used to be full of people whose decisions were never challenged, but most of those books had been burned for warmth. “What do you expect me to say?” she asked. “Do you think because I've got tits, I ought to have some sort of moral compass that always points north?”

“That would be nice,” John commented. “But right now I just need you to say _something_.”

Kate took a deep breath. The air here was so clear that she couldn't imagine ever wanting to go down there again. She couldn't imagine anyone wanting to not be out here all the time. “I'm not going to cry over them,” she finally said. “That's all I can give you on this.”

John nodded. “I'll take it.”

Then he went back inside. He needed sleep, but he probably wasn't going to get it. Kate signed. She needed sleep, too, but she probably wasn't going to get it either.

  


-

  


Things had changed when Kyle woke up. He couldn't tell how, though; could hardy think. He was feeling miserable: sick and weak, and his head ached, and he couldn't tell how long he had been asleep. Everything before that was a blur. He knew that Mildred Rias was dead, and Clara Montag, too. He'd dreamed about them. He'd dreamed about a lot of things, for what felt like forever. About Alex, except it wasn't Alex at all. About looking for Alyssa and never finding her. About looking for John Connor out in the wasteland and not finding him either. And about running after a figure in the distance, because for some reason everything would be okay if he caught up with them, but they were always just out of reach, and he didn't even remember who it was, (He thought, however, that it might have been Sarah Connor.)

When he drifted awake, his mind kept circling, unable to let go, around the image on Laina in the snow, surrounded by a growing pool of red.

It took him a while to piece together what had happened from the bits and pieces that stuck in his mind whenever someone talked to him. There had been a big, widespread attack on the machines and the army won, but apparently that wasn't good enough, as now all the people who weren't needed here were gone. More attacks were expected, which meant that Kyle needed to get out of bed, pronto. That was a strange word, pronto. He didn't really know what it meant, but Laina had used it sometimes when they were meant to hurry up. Kyle had never used it, even in his mind, until now. It came out of nowhere.

Reese didn't get out of bed. Before he could, he lost track of his thoughts completely, and then it was much later, and someone nearby was screaming. There were many wounded from the attack. No one had told him, but it was a logical conclusion. Also, he could see them, all around him. For a while he watched whoever he could, to see if he recognized anyone. He recognized almost everyone, and then he worried about those he didn't see here. Had he seen John since he woke up? Jeanette? Montag? No, she was dead. He remembered now. What had killed her? Was Perry still here?

Time passed, and the room around him gradually emptied. He didn't know how long he had been here. Sometimes he decided to get out of bed and back to his team, but he never remembered if he'd made it anywhere before he wound up here. Sometimes he felt good enough to try, other times he didn't even feel good enough to think, and his headache was blinding. He recognized at some point that he was laid up in the clinic's back room, where they stationed those that were dying so they would have some peace and quiet and would be out of the way, but he didn't worry about that. Mostly, he was just glad, because the light here was dimmer and didn't cause as much pain.

One time he woke up to a cool cloth lying over his eyes and a hand stroking his hair, but he couldn't tell, later, if that had really happened.

Eventually he came to understand that he had been exposed to something toxic during a mission, and after that the memories started to flow more smoothly. He remembered the factory of the terminators, and Montag falling into the basin, and Rias' spoon cluttering across the tiles. He saw Kate Brewster and talked to her for a bit, and asked about John and their children. She told him that they had this conversation before, but was willing to tell him once again that they were all okay. Hernandez was okay. Perry was okay. Ava had been shot, but was going to recover. Tyson was dead.

Reese was eager to get out of this place and back to his duties, but Kate wouldn't let him go for a long time, and it seemed that every time he felt well enough to leave, the lights would suddenly turn too bright for him to bear, or his legs would refuse to carry him. When he finally did leave, it was after John had been there to talk to him at length about his observations in the factory. There was going to be a trip across the area, planned to take weeks, and the ruins of the factory were one stop. John wanted to know everything about it because Reese wouldn't come with them.

He protested, but soon accepted that in his current state he wouldn't be a help to them. Even if he was released from the clinic, he still couldn't make a trip like that, or hold his own in battle. At this point, the best be could do to help the army was help out with tasks inside the base whenever he was strong enough to lift a medium-sized box. He accepted that, but it was hard. It felt like years ago, when the 132nd had left his place to return to the rest of the division and he had to stay behind.

What if they didn't come back? The fighting was moving further and further into the center of L.A., towards where they expected the core of Skynet to be, and there was talk of turning one of the auxiliary bunkers into a semi-HQ that was closer to the center of events. Would Reese be able to catch up with them later, in that case, or had he just lost another division to his body failing him?

He didn't voice any of that to his General. He just gave his report as detailed as possible and then he left for the barracks.

Even the short walk exhausted him, and while he was glad to be out of the clinic, the emptiness of the room he usually shared with most of his comrades reminded him even more that he was, once again, useless. The others weren't even gone yet, but they were busy with preparations and briefings. Deciding to put the strength he had to the best use he could offer, Reese took a brief nab to gather some energy and then left for storage. He was more familiar with his team's equipment than the people who usually worked there, whose duties rotated often. He could at the very least save them some time getting everything together.

As expected, they were grateful for the help. After almost every non-essential person had been send to San Diego, there weren't many people left to take care of seemingly mundane tasks that had to be done none the less. Now there was hardly anyone in this bunker who wasn't a soldier, but meals still had t be organized, washrooms still had to be cleaned, clothes washed, rats hunted for dinner and to keep them from spreading diseases. McSweeden and Genrier, the two soldiers on inventory duty today, told Reese that they felt like hardly anyone had left at all, but somehow the work of the remaining people had doubled.

Reese put his time to use as best he could, grateful that there was no urgency to the task he was given, as his head swam and his movements lacked coordination. For a while he got so lost in the simple activities of moving and breathing, that he didn't notice he was no longer alone. When he did notice, it came with a shock. The person who had joined him was no threat, but it could have been anyone else instead. Under different circumstances, his inattentiveness could have killed him.

So he jumped when he saw the young boy standing between the shelves, and the boy jumped as well, and retreated a few paces – not out of fear, but to signal that he was willing to go away if Reese wanted him to.

“Hey,” Reese said. “What is it?”

Casey came closer. He looked around, as if to make sure that no one was nearby. Somewhat confused, Reese stopped what he was doing and waited for more information, so he could figure out how to react.

He was surprised to see John and Kate's youngest here. As far as he knew, he usually stuck to his sister Louisa these days, making himself useful under her guidance. After all the others who were too young to be soldiers had been send to a safer location, he was almost the only child left here, but Reese didn't think that made all that much difference to him.

“Can I ask you something?” Casey wanted to know. Reese thought that the question was tricky, since he couldn't possibly say if he was okay with what he was going to be asked or if he had any kind of useful answer, but unless Casey asked, he wouldn't know, so he nodded. He was also still confused. It seemed to him that the boy had sought him out on purpose, and he couldn't imagine what he could possibly offer him that anyone else couldn't.

Casey looked at the floor and seem to steel himself. Then he blurted out, “Do you think I should be a soldier?”

Reese's confusion only grew. He understood neither the purpose of the question, nor why Casey felt he was the right person to ask.

His first instinct was to say Yes, of course. When he had been a child in the camp, being a soldier and getting to fight the machines was all he'd ever wanted, and now he couldn't imagine another life than this. The machines were still out to kill every single last human, and every single last human needed to fight them if they wanted to survive. Hiding was not going to help anyone.

But he remembered, before he could say anything, that Casey and him came from very different backgrounds. Casey actually did have a life outside of fighting, and a family who cared about him. He had experienced the war from as much distance as anyone possibly could. Perhaps he did not understand how important their struggle was. Or maybe that was not what he was going for at all.

“Do you want to be one?” Reese therefore asked, carefully. Casey made a vague gesture. Then he shook his head.

“I don't want to,” he whispered. “But I have to.”

“Why?”

“Because my dad is the General. And my sister is a soldier, and she's so tough and brave, and everyone expects me to be like that, but I'm not. I'm, I'm...” He stuttered and trailed off.

“You're what?”

“I'm scared,” Casey whispered, barely audible.

Reese had hoped that actually talking to Casey would help him figure out what was going on, but he kept getting more and more confused. “Of the machines?” he asked.

Casey nodded. “I know I shouldn't be, but I am! I don't want to be, but I can't help it. I hear all these stories, and I see the wounded soldiers come back without legs and it scares me! I don't want to be a soldier!”

“Okay.” Reese said. He was sitting on the edge of a box, and now he moved over for the boy to sit as well. “Casey, everyone is scared.”

“Not my dad. Or my sister. Or you.”

Reese thought about that. It was true that John Connor seemed fearless, but so did many others, because they kept calm in the face of danger and never backed away from any risk, but he'd always suspected that they were just good at handling their fear. Maybe he was wrong. He could only speak for himself.

“I don't know about your father and Jeanette,” he said carefully. “But I am always scared. It would be stupid not to be. It's just a question of what you're more scared of: them, or whatever happens if you don't face them.”

What scared Jeanette the most, as Reese understood it, was seeming like she couldn't, or wouldn't, contribute to this fight – losing the respect of her comrades. For John, he could only speculate, but Reese guessed it had something to do with not being able to protect his people. And maybe not living up to his mother's expectations. Reese could relate.

“But I would be so bad at fighting,” Casey argued. He had tears in his eyes. “All that would happen is that I would die, and maybe other s would die because of me, and it wouldn't help anything at all.”

That sounded like an excuse. But there was also truth in it. Reese sighed, wondering why it fell to him to have this conversation with Casey, and what it was that Casey wanted to hear. Confirmation, probably. An assurance that he could _not_ go out and fight even coming from the family he did, and no one would hate him for it. “You're still too young,” he pointed out. “It'll b a few years before you have to make that decision.”

Casey didn't look convinced. “But then I'll have to, right? They won't accept anything else.”

Reese didn't ask who “they” were. He thought long and hard before he spoke again. “We need soldiers,” he finally said. “The machines are not going to stop coming for us, and they are stronger, more numerous. Every single one standing against them counts. But,” he continued just as the despair started to show on the boy's face. “Not everyone make s a good fighter. You are right when you say that some people would just die out there, without being of any use, because they lack the instincts, or the courage, or for any other reason. That doesn't mean they are useless at all, just that their usefulness lies in other area. Like medicine, like your mother. They all contribute, and so will you. When the time comes, and you still feel that you cannot help us on the battlefield, then it would be irresponsible of you to go anyway, just because you think you have to. You'd help more if you found another way to support us.”

Casey still looked at the floor. He seemed to be thinking about the words, and Reese wondered what his reaction would be. Had that been good enough? He wasn't sure he had another speech like that in him. Putting things into words was not his strong suit, nor was expressing himself, or figuring out of to make someone feel better. And he wanted to, because if Casey, who also wasn't good with talking to people, came to him with this, he probably needed it.

Damn, but his head hurt! The lights in this room were far too bright, even with all the dark corners.

“I bet my grandmother would want me to fight,” Casey finally said, but it sounded a little lighter than before. “She was fighting all the time, and she got my dad to be like that, too.”

“I got the impression that Sarah was fighting to protect... well, everyone. She surely wouldn't want you to go and get yourself killed.”

“But she'd want me to protect my family as well.”

Once again, Reese wondered about this woman who had such an impact that even people born decades after her death tried to live up to her expectations. He was no exception himself. Reese admired the Sarah Connor from the stories, even the less glorious ones that John had told only to him, and would hate to act in any way that she'd be disappointed in.

“No one wants you to be helpless, Casey,” he now said. “I'm sure you don't want that, either.” Reese could imagine nothing worse, actually. He had spend too much of his childhood that way.

“Of course not!” Casey burst out. “But I can't protect anyone without being a soldier!”

“Yes, you can. Not going out to fight doesn't mean you'll have to be unable to when you really must. You can still get training so you'll be able to fight any machine that comes in here, without actually going out to look for them.”

Casey nodded, then he looked at Reese. “Can you teach me?”

“Me?” There were a dozen people better at that, and Reese was about to say so. But he realized that this conversation, about Casey's fears and worries, was not supposed to leave this room. For some reason, he had chosen Reese for this, possibly because he was the only one he actually knew who wasn't family, and now he wanted to involve as few people as possible. “I don't know,” he said uncomfortably. “If your father will let me, and if I'm still around when you're old enough, I can.”

Casey gave him something like a smile – a rare sight – and walked away. Reese turned his attention back to his work, but he suddenly had a hard time remembering what he'd been doing and why, and the headache flared up, as if only Casey's presence had kept it in check. He listlessly sorted through a box for another few minutes before the pain his his head and neck and chest became so bad that he puked bile all over the floor and passed out.

  


-

  


Kate wasn't even all that surprised when Kyle ended up back in medical only half a day after he left it. She hadn't expected his return to be quite as dramatic, though. Paul and Bobette carried him in after having found him unconscious on the floor of the main storage room where he had been helping them with inventory. His fever was back up to dangerous levels, and while Kate managed to get it down relatively quickly, it wasn't until the next day that he woke up. By the time he was coherent, two days had passed and John and his team were about to leave the base for weeks to come.

While he never said anything, Kate could tell that Kyle was very unhappy about not being able to go with them. And while he was not always the most sensitive guy on the planet, it seemed that John sensed that as well, when he came to say goodbye. Perhaps it had something to do with the fever bringing all of Kyle's emotions closer to the surface, or with the fact that, for some reason, John had allowed Kyle closer to him than anyone else who wasn't family. One way or another, he spend half an hour sitting on the edge of Kyle's bed, talking about his mother. About how she would bring him tea when he was sick, and how she'd force him to do his homework the moment he was able to think clearly, and then she would bring him ice cream when he was done and talk about things from her childhood that she never mentioned at any other time.

Kate found herself listening almost as intently as Kyle was when John spoke, his voice soft, of a time long before either of them had been born. “Mom didn't really get along well with her father, I think,” he said. “She never mentioned him to me. But whenever she spoke of her own mom, my grandmother, she would get that look in her eyes, that was a little like the look she'd get when she spoke about my dad. I think her mom mostly raiser her on her own, either without her father or despite him. When she got really sick, grandma would call in at work and stay home all day, even though she couldn't really afford taking days off and had to work through weekends to make up for it when Mom was better.

Listening to her talk about her mother always made me wish I had gotten to meet her, but she died before I was born. There really wasn't anyone to my family but Mom and me, and I think there hadn't been anyone for her but her mother, either. Of course, her childhood was very different from mine. My mother kept pushing me, while hers sheltered her as best she could. Then again,” John added, looking thoughtful, “I guess we're all just trying to protect our children as best we can, under the circumstances we're in.”

Kyle just looked at him, from her position flat on his back. He didn't have children of his own, and as far as Kate knew he also didn't have a mother, but she thought of her own parents right now, more than she thought of herself as a parent.

“Mom once told me that she had always thought, if she ever had children, she wanted to be a mother like hers had been. I can tell you, that was not to be. Might have been, though – Sarah wasn't always that super tough quasi-soldier who raised me. When she was your age, she was just a completely normal young woman who struggled to pay her rent and worked as a waitress at a fast food place and missed her mom. Sometimes the customers at the restaurant were assholes and she would just take it with an apology and be quietly unhappy about it rather than... reacting the way she would whenever _I_ saw someone try to pull any kind of bullshit on her. Actually, that's kind of hard to imagine for me.”

It was probably even harder to imagine for Kyle, who was lacking reference points in that story, beyond what the older ones had told him about fast food joints and apartment rent. But he made a vague gesture now, and said something that Kate couldn't quite catch, but she thought it had something to do with choosing your battles.

Apparently she was right. John chuckled softly, and nodded. “Yeah, well, she had to pick her battles all her life. Just the stakes changed. When I was a round she wasn't worried about how telling off assholes could get her fired from her job anymore, and more about how getting caught in the wrong spot at the wrong time could get her arrested and me into foster care. Not that that seemed to stop her much. She seemed invincible when I was a kid.”

He sighed, and put a hand to Kyle's shoulder. “One thing you have to know about my mom is that she was quite capable when it came to adapting to the circumstances she found herself in. The person everyone has heard about wasn't the person she started out as, and probably not even who she wanted to be. It was just who she _had t_ o be.” He reached into the jacket he was wearing and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper. Kate recognized in instantly: It was the photo of Sarah Connor sitting beside a dog in a jeep. She hadn't seen it in quite some time, and in that time it had aged, had become faded and torn. John showed it to Kyle, who seemed to recognize it as well. “This was taken when she was still only becoming the person she felt she needed to be. I never met the woman in this photo, only ever got to see her from a distance when she thought I wasn't looking.”

Kate couldn't help smiling from her spot on her desk, half out of view. John was admired, even worshipped by all of his men, and part of that was because they knew he cared deeply for them in return and did everything he could to keep them safe. Yet, he rarely let anyone get close to him. There was always an invisible, impersonal wall between him and everyone else, and while she knew why it was there, she was glad now – touched, even – when she saw him speak so softly to this young soldier, trying to be comforting, even sharing something personal like that. She knew it would mean a lot to Kyle, who had never asked for anything like this, and probably never had it offered to him either. She'd always known the man she loved was a good leader, a good general to his people, but it was nice to see him be a good man, as well.

Then, before he stood to leave, John pushed the paper into the young man's nearly limp hands. Kate waited for him to say something about this rather surprising act, but the only words that passed his lips as he turned away were, “I guess we all have to become the people the world needs us to be,” and there was an undertone of bitterness in that she hadn't expected.

Except maybe she had, Except maybe a thought had begun to form in her mind the moment John handed over that photo, and his words, the way he said them, drove it to the forefront of her mind and made it impossible to ignore. The anger came before she was even fully aware of _what_ she was thinking, and when the idea did settle in her awareness in a coherent, rational fashion, there was not one second in which it occurred to her that she might be wrong.

“It's him, isn't it?” she said later (not much later), without preamble, when she sought John out in the wash room. John, in the process of taking off his shirt, froze, and then looked at her as she continued, “The one you're gonna send back in time. It's Kyle.”

The way he looked at her, suddenly so defeated, made any reply unnecessary. He nodded anyway, and that was good, because she didn't know what she would have done if he had lied to her now.

“Yes.”

“It's him,” she repeated, with some helpless disbelief finally mixing into her rage. “And you knew it all along.”

“Yes.”

“Back in the day,” she said. “When we first met him. Right out of the camp. Did you know then?”

“Yes,” he repeated, and the urge to slap him became overwhelming.

Kate was living in a world full of violence. She didn't slap him. She hit the sink instead. “All this time,” she yelled. They were alone, but right now she couldn't have stopped if they weren't. “Acting like his best friend! I kept thinking how nice it was to see you finally warm up to someone, and how nice it was for Kyle to have you care like that, since _he admires you so_ , and all that time you were just preparing him to die for you one day!”

John sat on the edge of the brass tub. “Yes.”

“How could you? How–” Kate interrupted herself. A thought came to her and had to be voiced. “Don't do it.”

John looked pained. Like he was very tired, or about to cry. “I have to.”

“Send someone else! Someone older!” _Someone I don't care about_ , she thought. “Or make sure it doesn't happen in the first place.”

“It has to happen,” John insisted. “Don't you think if I could have prevented all that, I would have? Do you think I didn't spend the last _thirty years_ wishing there was another way? If there was, we wouldn't be standing here, but there isn't! And it has to be him.”

“Why?” Kate snapped. “What the hell is the explanation to all this? Some story your mother told you? Then you'd damn well better tell me now! Don't you dare lie to me again, like you have for the last thirty years!” It didn't matter that she had suspected there were things he wasn't telling her. She'd even suspected that he knew who it was he would send back in time, and it didn't soften this blow at all.

“What do you want me to say?” John snapped back. “That my mom told me the name of the man who saved her life back then? Well, you know that now, don't you? And you already know everything else!”

“And yet nothing of what I know tells me why we can't change things.”

“We can't, because we didn't. Obviously, it's still going to happen, or I wouldn't know about it and we wouldn't be here.”

“You don't know that. It's just a theory.”

“Just like how it's just a theory that messing with time might destroy the universe, and yet we can't risk that. So we've got two theories that say we can't change things, and one that also says trying might kill us all.”

“So you never even tried. You just accept that. That's not like you.”

“It wasn't like my mother, either, and yet she did! In all my life, she prepared me for this, for meeting Kyle and sending him back and she never, ever asked me to change it. You have no idea how hard that must have been for her! And you have no idea how hard it's been for me so far, if you talk about accepting things as if that were easy!”

That was probably supposed to sting. “Is that all you're going to give me here?”

“It's all I _can_ give you. I didn't keep it secret from you all these years because I didn't trust you, or whatever it is you're thinking right now. I kept it to myself because I knew the day would come for me to actually meet Kyle Reese, and know that I'll have to make him die for me in the end, and that was killing me, and I didn't want to do that to you as well!”

“Well, it's killing me now!” Kate spat. It wasn't true – right now, her anger at John consumed almost all other feelings and it was just an argument to throw at him, but she already knew that once it had settled and it all sank in, she would feel the full weight of what they were doing to that boy.

They. Because she was in it now, too. Just like John hadn't wanted her to be, and a part of her wanted nothing more than to go back to ignorance.

But hiding from the obvious truth had never been what she did.

“You think you were protecting me, how noble,” she went on. “Guess what: if I had known, maybe I wouldn't have allowed myself to get close to him. I wouldn't have allowed our kids to do that. How are they going to react when the time comes, do you think?”

“They'll probably hate me,” John said with the air of a man who had given this thought and accepted it. “I don't know. I just know that if I don't do it, they wouldn't be there to react to anything at all.”

 _Don't you think you're making this too easy for yourself?_ Kate thought. She didn't say it, though; John had already made it quite clear that easy wasn't on the menu. But she didn't know what else to say. She was still too angry, feeling too betrayed. She was beginning to get horrified, about Kyle's fate, and more and more about the fact that she had to go back to medical soon and care for him like she didn't know. And so she was, it seemed, beginning to get an idea of what John had been going through for decades, and feeling sorry for him was not something she wanted to do right now.

There were voices coming down the corridor. This room would not be empty much longer and Kate knew that, no matter how she felt about having been lied to, they couldn't allow anyone else to know. So she left, knowing that John was about to leave for weeks to come and they would not be able to talk again before he left. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw John throw a washcloth against the wall.

Kate returned to medical, where Giselle was handing out pills to a young woman who had gotten hurt in battle a while ago, and Kyle, who was asleep by now, still holding that photo of Sarah Connor between his fingers like a talisman.

The sight almost made Kate break into hysterical laughter. _She_ was feeling betrayed here. Right.

It was impossible to push her new found knowledge aside. She tried, just so she could do her job, but it wouldn't go away. Kate took Kyle's temperature, then she put a wet rag to his forehead to bring it down some and went to fetch some medication to give to him once he was actually awake.

“What am I saving you for?” she whispered, almost soundlessly, running a hand through his messy hair.

The problem was that she knew the answer to that question. Everything. Everyone. They apparently needed this particular kid to go and save all of them by saving Sarah Connor, even if Kate still didn't know _why_.

From a logical point of view, ignoring that the knew it would happen, it just didn't make any sense. Kyle was capable, adaptable, and selflessly brave when it came to protecting people, but he was also young, and very much a child of this time. He wouldn't know how to get by in the United States of the 1980s – hell, he barely even knew what the United States were. He didn't know how money worked, and probably would get arrested for openly carrying a gun or shooting up a toaster five minutes after his arrival.

And maybe he would manage to blend in. Maybe John would manage to prepare him enough to handle the world without freaking out (and suddenly all those stories John had shared about his childhood in the World That Used To Be didn't seem so touching anymore), but Kate didn't think for a moment that he would be able to interact with Sarah Connor – normal, clueless, intimidated-by-mean-fast-food-eaters pre-outlaw Sarah Connor – without thoroughly freaking _her_ out. Kyle was intense. He was driven and determined, and he had no freaking social skills. Would he be able to present his case in a way that would seen remotely non-psychotic to a University Student from 1984 Los Angeles? Probably not.

And even if, against all odds, he could, the fact remained that there were dozens of people who would be better suited for the job. People who were old enough to remember the time they would be send into, and the social conventions, and with some luck, they'd even know their way around the place. If even one of those people volunteered for that mission, logic would dictate that they took them, instead of this twenty-something boy with a map of scars on his body who knew nothing of the world.

“Are you alright?” a rough voice asked, right beside her, and Kate realized with a start that she was staring at the wall with tears running down her face. She hastily wiped them away and gave Giselle the best smile she could muster, which wasn't very good.

“I'm fine,” she promised. “Kind of tired. Something happened earlier, and... well, you know now it is when you're exhausted and your emotional defenses are down.”

“I used to,” Giselle confirmed, with a hint of sadness. “I haven't felt much of anything in years.”

A shiver ran down Kate's spine as she remembered Melissa and their final conversation, in a room much like this one. But Giselle wasn't going to go down that road. It was a different kind of numbness that she was feeling – Kate knew, because she felt it too, most of the time.

Right now, it would have been nice. The proof that she wasn't all dead inside didn't come with much comfort.

“I'll take over here for a while,” her friend said softly. “Beata will come in a few minutes anyway.”

Kate managed not to pull a face. Beata was new to their team: a former soldier who couldn't face any kind of human-shaped machine anymore without being reduced to a screaming mess. Away from terminators, she functioned just fine, and when Gina left with the civilians two weeks ago, she had offered to take her place on the medical team. She wasn't bad at it, per say, but she had little experience beyond applying field bandages and wasn't as fast a learner as Kate would want her to be. Beyond that, she was quiet and withdrawn, so Kate never really formed any kind of connection with her, and currently, she was mostly worried about how that woman would interact with Kyle, who might not be the best recipient for her distant and detached treatment.

Then again, he probably wouldn't think anything of it. Maybe right now, Kate was simply overly protective.

So, she thought as she left the room for a break she intended to be shorter than Giselle wanted, either time was in itself an unchangable loop that dictated it's own shape, and John would send Kyle simply because he had, or there was yet something else that he wasn't telling Kate.

This thought may have been what steered her towards the exit to the west. She didn't know. She hadn't made any conscious decision to go and see John one last time before he took off to leave her with these unanswered question and that knot in her chest for weeks. She just suddenly needed to, and while she knew that he was about to leave and would be surrounded by his team, maybe she hoped that there would be a chance for a few words in private anyway. Which there wouldn't be, of course. John wouldn't prioritize that.

Perhaps she wanted to see if the weight of their conversation was dragging him down like it was her, but of course he wouldn't show it if it did, not on front of those who needed him to be unmovable.

Perhaps she just wanted him to see her and remember that when he came back, she would be waiting here, expecting answers.

But he never saw her. She saw him, from the door up in the gallery, going though his pack, looking for something. He finally pulled out a cap to pull over his head, set down the bag and turned to talk to Ava Jan, never glancing in her direction. Neither did anyone else. Kate was invisible.

When she had been watching the movements going on down there for about a minute, Lieutenant Schneider walked up to John from behind and tapped his shoulder, saying, “Reese, I didn't kn- Oh.” He stopped himself when John turned around, revealing his face. “Sorry, Sir. I only saw your back. With the hat on, I thought you were Reese.”

“Don't worry about it,” John replied with a laugh that didn't sound forced. “That happens more than you think.”

It did, didn't it? Kate had heard that before. It was this odd resemblance – not in face, but in build, in the way they moved – between John and Kyle that had fueled the rumors about Kyle being John's illegitimate son from some long-gone affair. How absurd that idea had seemed! Kate had laughed about it and John had laughed with her.

And now this simple scene spelled out the truth before her.

It all became so obvious now. Suddenly, everything that had her left her with questions made sense. Kate stared at John, who kept going about his preparations completely oblivious, and wanted and dreaded for him to turn around and see her. He never did. She felt sick, her whole world once again shaken, but she kept standing there, staring down at the men and women leaving them until they were gone.


	33. 2028 - 3/3

The year was half over. It was July, almost August – Summer, technically. This year didn't care about that much. In the past decade, they had experienced longer and longer periods without snow, with temperatures above freezing. Nothing anything like comfortable, but a notable tendency towards warmer times, like a sign saying this ice age wouldn't last forever. But they had again and again been intercepted by winters that didn't end, years in which the ice never melted and the snow never stopped falling. This was one of those years; as if the weather wanted to remind them that the world was still broken and would be for as long as any of them lived.

The job of John and his men in the outskirts of L.A. would have been easier if the winter hadn't insisted on going on and on, but it was bearable. They were used to this, the snow and the cold. Their brief summers were a luxury, even when the only difference to winter was the lack of ice. It was nice when they happened, but their world wasn't shaken when they didn't.

John still wished it was warmer. He wished there was a storm, one of those that blew away the clouds for but a moment and let the sun come through. It was good for morale, if nothing else. Everyone was more optimistic when the sun was out, or when the air was still and the clouds thin enough that they could imagine the sun coming out as something normal. It felt hopeful. This weather felt bleak, endless, and without mercy. Normal, in other words.

The war was nearing its end, the humans were gaining more and more ground, and John Connor wished the weather would make it easier for them soldiers around him to remember that.

He wished _he_ could remember that. His feet were cold, his fingers and face numb. He was bone tired, his thigh aching from a shot that had grazed him last week. Yesterday, two men had died in a trap. Their truck had died three kilometers back and they would have to keep going until they reached the next base, get replacement parts, and then someone had to go back and repair the damage. Between them and the base was a long, long street lined with buildings that would hide anything trying to ambush them. Losing the truck meant they weren't bound to the road, but the walk through the partially blocked, crumbling alleys was exhausting and the enemy could find them here just as easily, with less room for them to run. John was tense, and so was everyone else, almost to the point of paranoia. It was a thoroughly miserable day.

But they'd get through this day, and then through another and another until the year was over. And once 2029 was upon them, the war could end any time. Any time.

There wasn't, however, some magical switch that would be flipped at some point in the year, destroying Skynet and declaring them the victor. They still had to work for it. Merely surviving to a certain point wasn't enough.

And there was still so much to do. John could see the path to victory now, had an idea where Skynet was vulnerable and how to get it there, but it was a long road, and he was already afraid that they would need more fighters to clear it of enemies than they currently had.

If he set aside all he knew about the future and only considered what he knew of the Now, John would still say that the end of the war was close, but he would estimate another two years of relentless struggle to achieve that. And even then, there was no telling which side would win the war. The machine were not exactly giving up now that the tides were turning in favor of the humans. Just three days ago, his troop had checked on a small base that had been set here for emergency purposes and found it burned out, the corpses inside torn apart in ways that made it impossible to tell how many it had been. To the west lay a group of people frozen in the snow, obviously gunned down while trying to get past the city. There had been about twenty of them that John and his men had found, obviously civilian and more than half of them children. They had spread out and hidden between the ruin as best they could, and yet it didn't look like a single one got away.

With this area swarming with machines, the soldiers didn't dare to contact the base they were aiming for. They hadn't had contact with them in a week, to be exact, and didn't know what was waiting for them if they ever got there. More and more of the small bases were falling, not only here.

It was a race, more than it had ever been, now that both parties could see the finishing line. Yes, the humans were gaining the upper hand, but there were also not a lot humans left. Birth rates were low, death rates high. And with the lack of communications, television, or internet, most people were not aware of or cared about anything but the land that surrounded them, but John was very conscious of the fact that more than a dozen countries had fallen silent since the war had started. Egypt, Syria, and South Africa, Vietnam and Mongolia, the south half of Chile, and a long, unbroken line running through Europe from Portugal to Poland had been backed out on the map in the command center.

Yet all of that didn't matter in this moment nearly as much as this alleyway before them, lined with high buildings that seemed to lean towards them, ready to collapse. There were holes in the walls, often running all through the building, created by some force or another running through then and tearing down anything in its path. Debris had fallen into their path, and the soldiers in the back of the group were still in the process of crawling carefully over the high pile of concrete and metal where one of the surrounding walls had collapsed completely.

Epson and Delgado moved forward on the left, checking that side for enemies, while John moved on the right until he reached a gab in the wall and peered through. There was hardly any snow falling, but the little movement still interfered with his vision in this light of advanced dawn: Too dim to make out much in the distance with their own eyes, yet too bright for their night vision goggles to be much help.

What he could see of the area was clear, and there were no tracks in the snow indicating anything had moved through here at some point in the recent past. This whole area should be relatively safe, anyway – they wouldn't have risked putting a base, albeit a very small one, here if there were machines swarming around that would see the tracks going there every time someone came or left. And so, despite the paranoia-inducing environment, it was tempting to be not quite as careful here, so close to the base. They were _all_ exhausted and cold and hungry and just wanted to get there. John had had to remind them to be cautious three times so far when someone got careless, which was three times more often than he ought to. But situations such as this were exactly what killed seasoned soldiers who had survived everything else.

And something in this gut told John to be careful here, Something inside his subconscious had picked up on little clues that his conscious mind had missed so far and flagged a warning sign. Something was off, and it unsettled him enough to make everyone go slow even now. He just wished he wasn't so tired and could tell what it was. That would make it easier to sell it to everyone else, as well.

Until the epiphany came, he would have to trust his instincts. Fortunately, his men had learned to trust his instincts as well. And he seemed to not be the only one to be nervous. Ava had fallen back to the end of the group, and whenever John looked in her direction she was looking back, as if to make sure nothing was following them.

Silence lay all around them, disturbed only by the barely audible breaths of the people immediately around John. Machines didn't make a sound when they weren't moving; the sounds John heard told him nothing but that everyone was very tense now, either infected by him or overcome by the same instincts. They were breathing flatly, trying to make as little noise as possible in an environment where the proximity of the base should have helped them feel moderately safe.

It was the silence that made a thought dawn in John's mind in the end. He expected it to be silent. There was nothing at all wrong with that. But it hadn't snowed heavily in a week, there had been no wind at all, and yet the snow around them was completely undisturbed but for their own traces. This close to the base, there should have been tracks, of soldiers coming and going to scout out the area, fight back the machines, or get supplies. There was nothing. This place was dead.

The thought had only just formed in his mind when Delgado lifted his hand and gestured for them to stop. They all did, not moving at all, while he lifted the narrow device he held in his hand. “Mines,” he said quietly. “At least five of them.”

John looked at the path in front of them, snow covering any sign that someone had messed with the ground at all. The path was narrow here, the buildings left and right intact, and no rubble blocking the alley for another twenty meters. It looked like easy, safe walking. “How are they spread out?”

“They aren't, Sir, from what I can tell. The entire line is blocked. No way to step on anything in that direction without being blown up.”

John looked back. Their group was spread out through over almost fifty meters, the last ones still on the more than man-high pile of rubble. There were no side arms to this alley more more than a hundred meters back; the only way to avoid those mines without having to go all the way back was a heavy steel door halfway between the mines and the debris that they had tried earlier and found locked. Since it wasn't their direct way and opening it would have generated noise, they had left it alone. Now John looked at their position – the mines, the rubble, the locked door, and the gray sky unreachable high above them – and knew their only hope was that the machines hadn't yet realized that someone had run straight into their trap.

“There are mines ahead, impossible to dodge,” he spoke into his comm, to inform those who where too far behind to have heard Delgado's words. “Ava, is there anything coming from behind?”

Ava, who had been halfway down the pile when the signal to stop had come, climbed up again to have a clear view. She was careful, never exposing more of her body that necessary, and her rifle was in her hand. Then the top of the pile exploded under the force of a grenade and her body was flung backwards in a shower of concrete.

One of the other soldiers nearby – John couldn't tell who – was hit by the rubble and went down. The others were moving towards the newly created gab, already firing before John even finished yelling, “Hernandez, that door! Be careful!” and started moving towards them.

This was not a fight they could win. It was, with luck, a fight they might survive. Suddenly John was very aware of his own mortality, of the fact that the future was not a promise but an achievement, and a part of him was imagining the war as it would go on without him, because he died here in this ambush along with everyone else. The better part of him was focused on running and not being hit by plasma fire.

He managed to doge all of that and make it to Ava, who was moving listlessly and covered in blood. John fired a few shots into the gab, and something on the other side was hit, though if it was by him or one of the others he could not say. What he could tell was that this was hopeless. There were at least two terminators out there and half a dozen other machines, all to them well armored and heavily armed, and they were having the advantage of position. All his team could do here was postpone the inevitable and go down fighting. Or, preferably, run away.

Another part of the barricade of rubble exploded. This time, the blast didn't go through, but the pile shifted and Stevens had to move quickly or get smashed. He moved right into enemy fire. Assani was on the ground, unmoving, and while John couldn't tell for sure from where he was, it looked like the rubble from the first blast had smashed in this head, or at least broken his neck.

Through his comm and the ringing in his ears, he heard Hernandez tell everyone to stand back from the door they were about to blast open, and then to stand back even further. After three decades of fighting together, he knew what John had meant with the warning to be careful.

John turned just in time to see Hernandez use his own plasma rifle on the door and it flew open – followed by an explosion much bigger than anything a rifle like that could do even to a structurally unsound building. Despite the distance he had taken to the door, expecting this trap, Hernandez was thrown backwards and hit the wall of the alley hard. A jolt of shock and fear ran through John even as he gave the others the order to retreat, but his old friend immediately regained his balance and started firing into the flaming hole that was their escape route. Nothing fired back. Either the machines hadn't thought to place back up there in case the trap didn't work, or the explosion and subsequent gunfire had taken them out already.

Or it was a more clever trap, that waited until any survivors made it through there before the back-up attacked. It was a chance John and the others had to take. That door was the only way they could run.

Hernandez was waiting outside for the others to go through. He had his weapon trained in the direction of their attackers now, and as John and Bauer dragged Ava towards the smoking opening where the door had been, his shots went past them – sometimes so close that John thought he felt them sear his skin. When they were through, Hernandez was the last to follow, constantly firing down the alley along with two others to keep the machines from pursuing them.

If they lured them out into the open, they might have a chance at defeating them. First they needed to get the wounded out of the way, though. John spotted a staircase running up to the second floor of the building, and he had Bauer help him get Ava up there. It wasn't safe, but it would be marginally safer then the middle of the battlefield, and John and Bauer needed to be able to move. They laid her in a corner of an empty room and ran down again, to make it before the machines could follow them outside.

  


-

  


The broad, open street they had been trying to avoid for its exposure became their salvation. It gave them enough room to move, and the surrounding buildings enough cover for the remaining members of their team to spread out and attack the machines in an orderly and effective fashion. As soon as the bots had followed them outside, it was a matter of minutes to take them out. Strong, but not very smart. The eternal bane of Skynet's lackeys.

John didn't feel like celebrating their limitations today. There was one last machine that was making their life hard by not leaving the building they had escaped through, and they couldn't throw anything heavy at it for fear of bringing said building down around Ava. In and off itself, the machine wasn't much of a problem, but the fight dragged on and John kept thinking about his friend in there, bleeding with no one to help her.

Ava made it though the fight. Neither did the ceiling collapse on her, nor did she bleed to death in the time it took them to take out the enemy. But she was badly hurt and mostly unconscious. They had to carry her, and the trap had made everyone even more nervous. Worse: They were still moving towards the base, now so very close, but John dreaded what they would find there.

It didn't take them more than fifteen minutes to reach it from where they had been, even slow as they were moving. Three hundred meters from the entrance, John took Bauer and Delgado and ordered everyone else to stay behind in the safety of a basement while they checked the state of the bunker. They knew they wouldn't find anyone alive in there. They just wanted to make sure it was safe to enter.

As expected, they found the place boobie-trapped. The entry hatch was rigged with explosives like the door in the alley had been, but knowing what to expect and without anyone firing at them, John managed to disable the trap without blowing it up. Aside from that, the machines didn't seem to have bothered with the place much. They had even left the dead bodies of the seven men and women who had been inside at the time Skynet took it out. They were spread all over the rooms, some in bed. No sign of a struggle. Delgado speculated that the place had been filled with gas and John agreed. For the moment it seemed to be safe, though.

John and the others hastily carried all the dead bodies into the armory, which had predictably been cleared of anything useful by the invaders. Bauer then went to see if he could somehow still find enough parts scattered around to fix the truck, while John and Delgado helped get Ava inside and settled in one of the beds. She was very pale and completely limp; at first, John thought she had died, but Epson, who had to stand in as their field-medic after Assani's death assured him that she was still alive. He didn't look optimistic, though, and John couldn't find optimism in himself either. Ava's chest and neck were covered in makeshift bandages that where more red than white, and her formerly gray hijab looked black now and was sticking to her head.

She came to when John helped Epson remove the bandage around her neck so he could properly take care of her wound. Groaning in pain, she tried to fight off the hands touching her and both John and Epson backed off, not wanting to hurt her any more than they had to.

“Oh,” she said finally, looking around until her gaze fell on John. Her eyes were glassy. “I though that was it.” She grimaced in pain and let out another long, painful groan. “I still think this is it,” she ground out when she could, and tried to smile but there was blood all over her teeth. “What happened?”

“Walked right into a trap. They came from behind, you didn't have a chance,” John told her. “We're in the base now.”

“Oh,” she said again, her eyes fixing on the ceiling. John's heart seemed to stop until she blinked and said, “Good. We made it, then, huh?”

“Yeah. Once we got them out in the open, they were no match for us.”

“I knew that. They can't defeat us in an ambush,” Ava said with effort. “They just... can't defeat us. That means we've almost won, right, John?”

“Yes, we've almost won, Ava,” he told her, but she didn't hear him anymore.

Hernandez met him outside a few minutes later, wordlessly offering a pack of cigarettes that John wordlessly declined. For a while they stood in silence, watching the gray sky. The snow had stopped completely now, but a light wind had come up, blowing wisps of powdery white across the landscape. “We can't stay here for too long,” John eventually said. “The machines will have noticed that their ambush troop was wiped out. This is the first place they'll look for us.”

Let them come, a voice inside John whispered. He wouldn't give in to it, just like he never had. But his hands were shaking and his eyes stung in the cold air; there was a reason why he usually kept his distance even to the most longstanding members of his team. He hadn't lied to Ava: They'd almost won, but to her, that didn't matter anymore.

“Delgado has found some tools and parts that he can use on the truck,” Hernandez told him. “Apparently, the bots took the weapons here but didn't bother with anything else. Once we've got the truck running, we can go back to Ulrich's bunker and get our shit together.” He looked at the crumbled pack of cigarettes in this hand, then put it away, unlit. “What about Ava?”

“We'll leave here here, with the others.” It was the only answer John could give, and Hernandez knew that. They couldn't take her along. Maybe they'd bring the place down the explosives, give them something like a grave, but – no. That was too sentimental an approach. They might need this bunker later, if not again during the war, then after it. Everyone here would get a decent burial when circumstances allowed it, no sooner.

He signed, letting his shoulders drop, letting his head hang. There was no one around but Hernandez, who knew him better than anyone safe Kate. No need to be strong and pragmatic here, except that if he allowed himself a moment of weakness, he didn't know if he could let go of it again. Ava was dead. John had lost many soldiers during this war, many he might have called friends under different circumstances. But never anyone he had allowed to get this close – to whose presence he was so used.

Robert Brewster had been a good, well respected friend, but he had been a friend who had lived far away, and he had died far away. His absence had left more of a gab in the military organization than in John's life – or Kate's for that matter.

Everyone in the army, and it seemed literally everyone, in general, relied on John Connor always keeping his cool, on him being untouchable in the face of every day's tragedies. Maybe this was the whole secret: Maybe in all these years, he had simply been lucky. He hadn't lost any of his children, or his wife, or even his closest friends – not anyone but his mother, so long ago.

He remembered the jolt of shock – of near panic – when he'd thought Hernandez had been killed by the blast not an hour ago. He didn't know how he would have reacted if that had really happened. Would he still have been able to lead this team out of that ambush intact, or would have have lost it? He found now that he had never truly been tested and so didn't know if he deserved the faith everyone put in him.

He cursed under his breath, trying not to feel the loss. To shove it away to all the other tragedies until the war was over and he had a chance to deal with it. But he couldn't. He couldn't just swallow this loss, and as he turned away to hide his face from Hernandez, he was acutely aware of the event casting its shadow over the loss that was still to come. How could he handle that, when he couldn't even handle _this_? In this moment, John was absolutely certain that he couldn't.

A moment later, Hernandez laid a hand on his shoulder, and yet another moment after that, John had his face pressed into his friend's shoulder, trying to keep the sobs from coming. He succeeded – there were no tears either, although at this point it didn't seem to make much difference. Hernandez merely patted his back, letting him know it was okay. And John was so grateful, and at the same time so ashamed, because Hernandez had also lost a friend today, and he had lost his son and his wife before – a kind of pain that John could only imagine. He shouldn't have to be the strong one here.

They didn't talk for a while. Eventually, they separated, and the first thing Hernandez said was, “If we go back the way we came, we can be sure we won't walk into any more traps.”

“But we might walk into more machines,” John pointed out.

“I say we take that risk.”

“So do I.” It would be easier and safer than searching for a new route. John looked over the land, mentally mapping out their journey. The grief was still in him, as was the dread of things to come, but he was able to push it back again and focus on getting them to safety.

Once they were back at the last bunker they had stopped at, they would need to find a new route west, and to the last scheduled stop of their trip before they returned back home.

  


-

  


They had started their round around and through L.A. with the terminator skin-factory blown up earlier and had spend two days thoroughly going through it, The place was huge, as Kyle had indicated, containing three more production halls like the one he had crossed on his way to the generator. Most of the factory was now in ruin and it was clear that there would be no more production in this one. Still, some parts had escaped mostly untouched; they were a good opportunity to get an idea of how the machines operated in places like this, but they also contained a few stray bots, obviously send to salvage what was left to salvage, or simply spared by the explosion and never recalled to a relay station for new instructions.

Their final stop was the ruin of the abandoned facility where Skynet had, by the look of it, been researching time travel technology. Everyone was standing around in the vast complex, looking in astonishment at the dead displays and complex machinery lining the walls, and at the burned out metals shells and inactive T-600s with their artificial skin melted off their metal bones. No army weapon had done that. Something had gone up here, and it had thrown killer bots with up to a ton of weight through the halls with enough force to smash all equipment, and burned out the most durable and relentless ultimate killing machines ever created on this planet in ways that even Skynet saw nothing to salvage here.

Everyone appeared to be, quite frankly, stumped by the sight and the scale of this complex. No one knew what it was for, or what had created such destructive energies, but they imagined those energies directed at their bases and it sobered them up. They needed to win the war before Skynet managed to complete whatever it was the machines where trying to build here.

John imagined those energies directed at Kyle, for the first time getting an idea of just what kind of power they were dealing with here. Nothing dead would go through the field generated by the time displacement equipment – John already knew that organic matter was safe, and apparently Skynet was just in the process of figuring that out. Still, it was harrowing to imagine a fragile human body exposed to currents that would tear a terminator apart.

Everything inside the place was dead; there was nothing for them to harvest, except radiation poisoning. Their Geiger counter showed levels that no one was comfortable with exposing themselves to for longer than necessary, and so they left after a few hours of exploration that yielded nothing but some notes for their scientists to look at, not even any robots left behind as guards.

A part of John, looking back at the great hall with the deep well and the twisted contraptions, wished Kate was here with him. She knew now – some of it, anyway. He could tell her what this was if she didn't figure it out on her own and he wouldn't be so lost and helpless on his own. But Kate was mad at him, justifiably so, and if she were here, seeing this terrible reality in front of them would probably only make it worse. No, John wouldn't be able to deal with her hating him right now. He was too preoccupied hating himself.

At least she didn't know that the kid he was about to send to his death was also his father. He didn't want to fathom how she would react to that.

John would find out when the war was over, Kyle was gone, and his guidance wasn't needed anymore. At some point he would need to come clean about everything, no matter how painful. He owed that to everyone, but more than anyone else to his parents. And when the world judged him for it, he'd welcome it. But until then, he had to carry it alone just a little bit further.

  


-

  


Kate had barely been able to wait for John to come back, all the words she needed to say to him burning on her tongue. It was hard for her to be around Kyle now; it was even hard to see her children around him, because she kept imagining how they would react when they learned the truth. She tried not to show it but Kyle must have sensed something was wrong anyway. He left medical too early, insisting that he could sleep just as well in the barracks. Kate let him go, and only send Giselle or Jim to check on him. Lou still went frequently to talk to him, Casey seemed to prefer his company over his mother's these days (not surprisingly, as his mother wasn't good company right now) and even Jeannie went to see him whenever she had the time. Kate let them. What would she have said, anyway?

She remembered the crush her oldest daughter used to have on the young soldier. It didn't seem so amusing now. And John's reaction suddenly made a lot more sense.

Then John actually returned, after almost two months out there. His team was greatly reduced, and even through her anger, Kate was sad to learn that Ava Jan had been killed. When the first soldiers came to her clinic for the treatment of minor wounds, she could see the hardship etched into their gaunt faces. It was a sight she was used to. It did little to distract her from the other thing that was on her mind, especially when Kyle came in to check on his comrades and offer his help with anything they might be too exhausted to do, but it did keep her from tearing into her husband the moment they were among themselves, as right now, that would have made her a bigger bastard than he was.

So this time she did not ambush him in the washroom, nor did she leave her place in medical. Things would happen once there was time for things to happen. She would not force this confrontation, no matter how much she wanted to.

For a while she lost herself in her work. Two of the soldiers had to stay longer, because of burns and blood poisoning respectively. They did not need surgery yet, but there was a chance that they would have to take off Duna's leg eventually, to save her life – a prospect that obviously terrified the young woman and something Kate wanted to avoid if at all possible. They would have to monitor her state carefully, though. Fortunately, just ten minutes before Jim came to take over everyone's care, Kyle finished whatever it was he had been doing and he came in to provide some much needed distraction for his comrade.

Kate watched them for a while, from a distance. Kyle obviously cared about his fellow soldiers, and obviously felt bad, perhaps even guilty, for not having been there to help them on their trip. Even as an outsider she could see his determination to keep them safe as best he could. It was easy to see why John's mother would fall in love with him so quickly.

But how quickly was it, exactly? John had told her that the man who came from the future to save his mom was killed within days of his arrival. But then, he had told her so many lies, how could she trust that now? Maybe, in his attempt to mislead her regarding his lineage, he had left out the part in which Kyle actually survived the terminator and he and Sarah lived on happily for a while. She didn't doubt that he would die young, before the war even started, but didn't that still leave the possibility that he had a few good years with Sarah and John before dying peacefully in a word that wasn't broken?

Her eyes filled with tears when she realized that she was just fooling herself. John had also told her that his parents had known each other for a very, very short time and that his father had died before he was born. There had been no reason for him to lie about that – none that she could see, anyway.

Only he could answer the questions she had, and when Jim came in to take over, Kate left immediately, to go back to her bedroom and see if John was in there. He was not. Louisa was, sleeping curled up on their mattress; the fact that she was fully clothed indicating that she was only taking a brief nab.

Kate sat down on the work down metal chair in front of the worn down desk. The pillow on the chair was worn, too, and had already been when she'd placed it there years ago. The blankets on the bed were threadbare, the sheets thin and stained in ways even washing methods better than their improvised ones wouldn't be able to remove. The mattress itself had become so thin it seemed like they were sleeping on the floor sometimes. There was the metal cabinet in the other room, and a few boxes that Kate and Jeannie had stacked on top of each other to make something resembling a cupboard. That concluded the list of furniture in their room, and they still had so much more than most others.

There were no windows down here under the earth, of course. The walls were bare and spotty, in one corner concrete was slowly breaking out of a hole in the ceiling. It always smelled a little moldy, and it was always cold. Their metal door was rusting at the edges. The bare light bulb in the ceiling wouldn't give enough light for anyone to work at this desk without the help of the smaller lamp that they only used when they had to because of their limited supply of replacement bulbs. The war had not been very kind to glass.

There was an old, torn folder in which Kate had collected the drawings her kids had made as toddlers, but they had never gone on any walls. This was not a home to her, even though they had been in this location longer than anywhere else. This room was merely a place to sleep, and to have conversations that no one else was supposed to hear.

Despite seeing it every day, Kate could only imagine how those living in the great halls along with hundreds of others managed. No real privacy in all their lives. This was luxury indeed.

Kate was tired, but knew sleep was not an option; not before she had talked to John. John, however, was elsewhere, taking care of things, no doubt, and it could be hours before he made it here – days, if he just slept on one of the cots standing in quiet corners of the command center.

It occurred to Kate that maybe he would do that on purpose; not to be available to his men but to avoid her. He had to know that their confrontation that began so many weeks ago wasn't over. And she could imagine that, worn out and feeling the loss of people he was responsible for, one of them a friend, Kate's anger and questions were something he just couldn't deal with right now.

It made her feel a little guilty, made her, perhaps, a little more willing to be gentle when he finally came. Whenever that would be. Lou woke up half an hour later, and they talked a little bit before the girl left to help in the kitchen. Kate didn't move to the bed. She could have used this time for so many things, but none of them would hold her attention, not even sleep.

Time tickled by. At some point, Kate migrated to the bed, sitting on it when the hardness of the chair began to dominate her awareness. At some later point, she woke up and stared at the ceiling, realizing that against all expectations she must have fallen asleep. Her legs were still mostly in sitting position and her body twisted uncomfortably at the waist. She groaned softly as she sat up.

“What time is it?” she asked John, who had turned on the desk chair to look at her. His eyes seemed hollow and haunted, and she didn't have the will to start this encounter by spitting in his face.

“Almost six-thirty,” he informed her. “In the evening.”

Kate nodded slowly, trying to clear the fog from her head. “When did you come in?”

“About half an hour ago.”

“Have you eaten anything?”

John snorted softly. “Yeah, I was bullied into it. Have you?”

Kate hadn't. She didn't have the stomach for it, but she really should before she got back to work. “How did your mission go?”

He sighed. “Well, you've seen what's left of my troop.”

“That's not your fault.” The words were out before Kate could stop them. She wasn't here to comfort her husband, but she knew he was blaming himself for everyone he couldn't protect, and in this case that was unfounded. She hadn't been there and hadn't received a detailed report yet, but she knew John and knew he had done his best to get everyone back alive.

More often than not, he was successful in that. His team was famous for it's legendarily low death rate. Somehow, it seemed that had convinced John that when someone died after all, it was something that he could have prevented.

“No,” he surprisingly agreed with her. “These losses are not on me. Others are. That's what you really want to talk to me about, isn't it?”

He wanted to tackle it full on, obviously. That was surprising, too, but it shouldn't have been, and Kate was okay with it. _'Of course it is,'_ she nearly said. Or, _'Tell me everything!'_ What she did say was, “You told me your father's name was Karl.”

John froze, and the look on his face would have been the only confirmation she needed if she had doubted for one moment that her epiphany had been wrong. She had hoped it was, she now realized. It would have made everything a little less horrible.

John's face twisted into a look of pure anguish and he looked away.

“It's almost funny,” Kate went on, keeping her voice light, conversational. “All these years I thought our son's name was the short form of something that sounded pretty ridiculous, and now I find out that it's actually short for something else, that sounds equally ridiculous.” She suddenly stood, her hands balled to fists. “Dammit, John! How could you?”

John ran a hand through his hair and didn't look at her. “You figured it out already. You know how, then.”

“Yeah, I get it. I just don't see how you _can_. How can you do this? How do you get through the fucking day?”

“I can because I have to.” There was no force behind his words. “I wish I didn't, but I do. All of this, our lives, our chance to win, our _children_ , all of it hangs on Kyle going back in time. And it would be different if it was just about me, but it's about all of us. Hell, Jeannie, Lou, and Casey wouldn't even exist if I found a way to save him.”

Kate was aware of that. She had been for weeks, and part of her reason for avoiding Kyle lately was shame about how willing she was to sacrifice him for her children.

“So if you're wondering why I never told you,” John continued.

“I know the reason for that,” Kate interrupted him. “You wanted to spare me having to feel exactly like I am feeling right now. And how you have probably been feeling for thirty years. God, John,” she added. Her anger wasn't gone, but it was suddenly mixing with pity. “You didn't have to carry that alone!”

“Yes, I did. For exactly the reasons you just listed.”

“I'm your wife! We may not be officially married, but we made some promises to each other. It's my job to help you through _anything_. As your lover, and as your friend. It's what I want to do!”

“And it's my job to protect you from anything I can!” John snapped back. “Just as it's my job to deal with this guilt. It's _my_ sin!”

“Not yet,” Kate whispered.

He had risen from his chair. They were standing in front of each other, yet several feet apart.

“Yes, it is,” he told her. “It has always been, since before I was born.”

“That's just not fair.”

“Yes, it is,” he said softly. “Even if I hadn't done it yet, it was still my responsibility. _I_ did it. I'm going to do it. The path may have been laid out for me but I still chose to walk it.”

Kate had no words of comfort for that, because he was right. “Tell me everything,” she demanded. “Don't lie to me, don't protect me, just give me all the information that you have.”

John made a vague gesture. “You already know most. At some point in the future, Skynet will accept that it has been beaten and send a terminator back in time to kill my mom. It's already working on the technology. We visited the site of their first tests a few days ago.”

Kate's heart did something painful. “When?” she asked, before her throat could close. “I know you know.”

“In 2029,” John said without hesitation. “I don't know when exactly.”

“Next year,” Kate whispered. And felt only joy and relief. A part of her was ashamed for that because it meant that Kyle would be gone so very soon, but mostly she was overcome by something that bordered on euphoria at the idea that in less than sixteen months, the machines would be history, and they could all return to the surface, and her children would be safe.

“We found the prototype of the thing they're gonna use for time travel, and all the destruction it caused, Kate, all those terminators around were literally toasted,” John suddenly babbled. “And no one else got what it was all about, of course, and I couldn't tell them or share that with anyone, and I kept wishing you where there so I could share it with _you_ , but of course I thought I couldn't do that either, not really, but now...” He threw up his hands in a gesture that looked like defeat. “It was horrible,” he simply stated. “And it's gonna get so much worse.”

Kate stared at him, taken aback by the words, as even now it took her by surprise every time he showed that he needed her. And yet he didn't let her help him. All those years would have been easier on him (perhaps, a little bit) if she had known the full extent of what he had to do, but he'd kept that from her and no matter how well-meaning it was, it made her angry. Because he'd kept her from helping someone she loved, because he'd kept information from her that she'd wanted and needed to feel like there was hope, and also, maybe, because it seemed he felt she couldn't be trusted with that knowledge.

“So tell me now,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. She wanted to hug him and comfort him, but she also wanted to strangle him, and while that took a backseat at the moment, she didn't want him to think that her feeling sorry for him meant he had been forgiven. Neutral was the best either of them would get here. “Just start at the beginning. Anything your mom told _you_.”

They both were sitting again when John began his story, though this time he was on the bed and Kate on the chair. As he'd promised, much of it she already knew, but knowing it was Kyle he was talking about and how that would end put a different spin on it.

On a Friday night in May 1984, young Sarah Connor was out alone, when she overheard a news announcer report that a woman also named Sarah Connor had been murdered. This having been the second Sarah Connor to die that day, she understandably freaked out and called the police for help while smartly hiding out in a dance club – which would have been the best thing to do, had the killer that was after her actually cared about being witnessed on his murder spree. She'd suspected a young man in a trench coat who seemed to have been following her, but it turned out the danger actually came from a large, empty-looking guy in a gang jacket, who tried to take her out by opening fire in the middle of the dance floor, and was stopped by the man Sarah had originally thought wanted to murder her.

Unfortunately, him saving her from the bigger killer didn't really convince her that he did not want to murder her as well. It took some yelling and biting and hurried explanation about time travel, killer-cyborgs, and Sarah's future son to calm her down to the point where she still thought “Reese” was nuts, but accepted that they had a bigger problem coming after them in a stolen police car. Also, her savior from the future was so scarily intense about his story that she was compelled to believe him; and even though that belief faded later in the harsh light of a police station, she was at least convinced that he believed it himself.

After getting themselves arrested at the end of a car chase, Sarah learned that friends of hers had been brutally murdered in her place, and before her mother could come and pick her up, the terminator walked into the police station and murdered everyone, looking for her.

Everyone except Reese, that was, who had escaped and got her out of there alright, although apparently he got shot in the process and failed to mention that until hours later, when they were spending the night under a fucking bridge. Kate could see that, completely. If it wasn't an injury that hampered him much, Kyle wouldn't find it worth mentioning in situation like that, especially with a partner who was already overwhelmed. She could imagine how terrible that must have been for Sarah – hunted by a killing machine, with nothing but their wits and the clothes they were wearing to help them, forced to seek shelter underneath a bridge – and how normal that would have been for Kyle. Possibly even comforting. May in California – warm weather, only one enemy, a bridge above them that was structurally sound. If not for the lack of proper weapons and unfamiliar surroundings, he'd probably call that perfect circumstances.

Sarah eventually accepted that what he had told her was true, there, but was reluctant to accept the role it put her in, and Kate didn't blame her. She also asked if Kyle knew about John's father, and he didn't know much, just that he died before the war, at which point Sarah stopped him from talking, not wanting to know too much. “Kyle delivered a message from me under that bridge, that I'll have him memorize,” John recalled, his eyes far away. “I don't know what exactly, Mom wouldn't say. All I know is that it wasn't particularly helpful, so I guess I don't have to worry about it much when the time comes. She let slip that I said something about the future not being set. Back then, she saw that as a promise – that the future could be changed, the war could be prevented. Knowing what I know now, I guess it was more of a warning: That the future could be changed by her dying there, that she wasn't safe just because a future in which the terminator didn't kill her existed. Although I am no longer sure that's true. I won't put it to the test, though.”

“Because all things considered, if we accept the war being inevitable, this is still the best possible outcome,” Kate guessed. “And Skynet made it all possible. They would have won long ago, because you really would never have been born, if they hadn't tried to prevent just that.”

“Yeah. They would have won if they had simply done nothing, It's the one irony in my life that I actually appreciate.”

Kate snorted, though humor was hard to find here. After a moment, John went on, telling her how the next day Sarah and Kyle hitchhiked to the next town where they rented a motel room with money that Kyle had stolen somewhere. He gave Sarah her first gun there, which served more to make it clear what her life would be like from now on than it would have served as actual protection against the T-800. While she had a shower, he went out to buy supplies, and it turned out that his idea of a good meal consisted entirely of explosives. Kate already knew this part – also that he taught Sarah how to build pipe bombs and that she later passed this knowledge on to her son. What she hadn't known was what came after that.

“Mom never went into detail there,” John said. “No surprise, I guess. She did tell me, though, that Kyle mostly just told her he loved her to get up her spirits when she was doubting herself.”

“He does love her,” Kate protested. “Even I can see that.”

“Yeah, that was never in question. What I mean is, he wasn't actually hitting on her. When he realized that his confession might make things awkward, he immediately withdrew. It was Mom who had to get things started.”

“That's not surprising.” Kate couldn't imagine Kyle actually hitting on someone. He probably didn't even know what that was. What she could imagine was him being completely unaware of how uncomfortable a confession of love could make a person. Social skills were not something that held any kind of value in his life. “So that's why it has to be him,” she concluded. “Great.”

John looked pained. “Nothing about this is great.”

“I supposed you'll never tell him.”

“No. Can you imagine how he would react? If I told him he's expected to have sex with my mom, I'd just be doing the machines' job for them in making sure that I'll never exist.”

Kate _could_ imagine that. She could see why they had to keep this from Kyle, but it made everything even worse. “And he'll never actually know you're his son,” she guessed.

“No. As I told you, he'll be dead within a two days of meeting Mom.”

A short romance. Very, very short; certainly not enough to make up for a life of misery. It sort of made sense from Kyle's point of view. He had known about Sarah Connor for a long time, after all, and admired her greatly. Actually meeting her in person must have been like walking through a dream. As for Sarah, well. She clearly hadn't needed a lot of time to fall in love.

Then again, their bunkers were full of couple who had known each other for less time than that. There was something about going though dangerous situations together that made people fall for each other. And there probably was a lot of appeal to a guy who was willing to die for you.

And would.

There was just no angle to view this from that wasn't depressing.

It got worse when John continued speaking. “When I was a kid I would console myself that at least my parents truly loved each other, and that I came from that, not just from this need to save the world. That really meant something to me, you know? And Mom kept talking about my father, every now and then, and she'd always get that look in her eyes as if nothing could ever replace what she had lost, so that was sad, but it was also comforting, in a way. Except that one day I suddenly realized – I mean, I really _got_ it then – that my parents had barely known each other at all. That man Mom was so in love with didn't really exist, it was someone she had made up after he was already gone.”

Kate didn't have anything to say to that. She couldn't imagine what that had been like, except perhaps from the other perspective, where she was no longer sure how many aspects of her mother, near-sanctified in her memory, were really her mother, and how much she had made up to replace things she had forgotten with things she wished were true.

“I felt... betrayed, I guess,” John went on. “And for a while I really hated my father, as if that was all his fault. Even now I always wonder what my mother would have thought of him if she'd really known him, here, like this. I keep looking for disgusting habits that Mom would have hated, or any kind of behavior that she would have found annoying. I wonder if their love would have existed outside of adrenaline and the need for comfort, and I come up blank.”

“You don't think it would?”

“I do. That's it. I really want to think that, so I can't really trust my own assessment, can I? All I can do is tell Kyle as much about my mother as possible, all the details beyond the legend, so at least he has a chance to base his opinion on the real person she has been.” He suddenly laughed without humor. “Two years ago, when he was hurt and couldn't get out of bed, I was feeling particularly gloomy and resentful of everything. I wanted to challenge destiny and all that bullshit, and so I just told him about all of Sarah's bad sides. Her impatience, her bossiness, that time she forgot my birthday, how she never listened to me, even that one time she was an ass to some poor girl in a supermarket because she was having a bad day and we happened to be on the run from the police. I wanted him to not like her anymore, in that moment, I think. Make him think she isn't worth it.”

Kate could only speculate what had driven him to do that. “I take it that didn't work.”

“If anything, that was the moment he fell in love. I could actually see it in his face. I took this statue of a person, this distant legend, and turned her into a real human being. Something tangible. I think he'd never have loved her the way he'll have to if I hadn't done that.”

There was something like helplessness in his voice. They were stuck on this path, it appeared. Kate wondered, however, if maybe it wasn't comforting if they _literally_ couldn't change things, as opposed to having that option and consciously deciding not to do it.

Except they also never had tried very hard. Too much at stake.

“It just seems so unfair, Kate,” John muttered. “I wish Mom could have really known him. I mean, he's got no table manners and would never take off his shoes before walking into a living room, but I think she'd forgive that. But even if I am right and she really would have loved the real him, there's just no way she could have known that. A part of her must have always wondered.”

“He did die for her,” Kate pointed out. “That's gotta count for something.”

“Yes, there's that.”

“So what happens next?”

“Just was I already told you. They spend a night in a motel room, but the terminator finds them before morning. Mom suspects that he found out where they were through her mother somehow, who got murdered, probably by him, that same day. Kyle told her not to contact anyone, but she didn't want her mom to think she was dead after the shooting at the police station...” He trailed off, but Kate didn't need him to say any more about this. She could only imagine the guilt Sarah must have felt about this. It got Kyle killed, and her mother died, too, so it was all for nothing.

“What would have happened if the terminator hadn't found them?”

“Who knows? Apparently, Kyle's plan was to hide from it until they found a way to take it out, and keep Sarah out of danger, but Mom would rather do something about it right there and then. She had this idea to take out CyberDyne before they could create Skynet, thinking that this was the only way to make sure they couldn't send anything else after her. Also, it would save the world. Not a bad idea. When the terminator found them, they were on their way to the CyberDine factory in L.A., planning to blow up their production lines at night, when no one was around.”

“That sound like a good plan,” Kate said even as her heart did something painful when his words sank in. One phone call less, and the war might never have been happened. Her mind traveled back to the moments of panic in the bunker in El Paso, to the desperation and grief when she realized her mother and brother where gone. To all the people she'd seen suffer and die since then, the desolation outside, the lack of real sunlight. Her eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them stubbornly away.

“Yeah. I always thought so, too.” John finally looked at her again. “I may not be able to change much without risking everything, but I will tell Kyle to cut he fucking phone line in that motel room!”

Could it really be so easy? Kate didn't dare to hope, but she knew the thought would stay with her until the end.

“I hope it works,” she whispered. But did she really? If John did manage to rewrite history, what would become of the history that had already happened? What of them, what of their children, who would never be born? Would they all just disappear? And if so, how could history be changed, then?

Would she ever find out?

“Anyway, you know the rest. They run from the terminator, lose their car, end up in a factory, and Mom manages to take out the pile of metal that's left after a bunch of explosions with a hydraulic press, but not before it kills Kyle. After that, she quits her job, leaves her apartment, gets a dog, and take up self-defense training. And learns how to shoot. And pick locks, and hotwire cars. Oh, and somewhere in there she noticed she was pregnant, I guess.”

He fell silent, and for a long time just stared at the wall. Kate tried to come up with something to say, but she couldn't as long as she wasn't sure how she felt about all of this. She hated everything about what they had to do (it was _them_ , now, no longer just John), but could see no alternative. And she was still mad at him for the secrets he had kept from her, but she also wished he had kept them a little bit better. Life had been easier without knowing. For decades she had occasionally wondered who it might be John would send back in time, and that had been all.

“Mom was making records while she was pregnant, and when I was a toddler. Some kind of audio-diary. They were directed at me, but it was mostly for her, trying to get her thoughts in order. She told me later that she was half-convinced she'd never actually give them to me, and that that made it easier to get everything out.”

“But she did give them to you?”

“Yeah. At that point they held little new information, anyway. Well, more than once she was marveling over whether or not she should tell me about my father. I actually wished a lot that she hadn't. But I guess she thought she owed him that much.”

In this moment, Kate wished Sarah had kept the identity of John's father a secret as well. Because she loved him, and that simple act would have saved him a lifetime of guilt and suffering.

“You don't?” she asked, carefully.

John stood and walked over to the cabinet on the wall, the locked one. He unlocked it, and then he took out the small box with his personal belongings and unlocked that as well with a key he carried around his neck. Kate had never really seen what was in there. Some photos he had taken out and shown her, or their children. One he had passed on the Kyle in what she had then thought was blatant manipulation but had maybe been more. She'd never tried to look at the rest of the things inside, respecting that little bit of privacy contained in that small box.

Now he put it on the bed, reached inside, and handed her a stack of papers without comment.

Kate took them with a feeling of trepidation. Right at the top where a couple of photos that she had seen before. John as a child, and his mother, standing in front of a picket fence. A snapshot of Sarah aiming a rifle at a practice target. A photo of John as a baby, next to a watchful dog.

Beneath that was a folded sheet of paper. Kate unfolded it now, her heart pounding. It turned out to be a print out of a security camera shot, showing Sarah Connor, very young, and Kyle Reese, also very young, standing on a set of metal stairs, apparently driven backwards by whatever it was that was just barely visible at the edge of the picture. Kate swallowed drily. What she saw here was one of the last moments of Kyle's life, and that it hadn't happened yet made it worse.

The image was dark, grainy. Kate recognized the people in it because she knew who they were. The next folded paper also contained a photograph, but this one was better, had been taken with intent. Kyle, looking very much like he did now but with cut hair and a shirt he would freeze to death in around here, looking at the camera in front of a very distinctive background.

Obviously, that was the mug shot taken when he got arrested after the car chase that ended with Sarah making the terminator drive against a wall. Kyle didn't look like a man who had just been arrested on some serious charges. He looked impatient, irritated, and a little haunted – like a man who was facing an annoying obstacle he really needed to go away.

How frustrating it must have been. Kate wondered it it ever dawned on Kyle that his journey could very well end there, that sheer determination wasn't going to get him out of that situation. Ironically, if not for the terminator coming in and murdering everyone, Kyle actually could have been taken out of the game at that point. If the T-800 had just waited half a day before attacking Sarah on the way out...

Fortunately, patience was not the machines' strong point. And without Skynet actually there to guide it, even a terminator could do little else but dumbly follow its primary programming.

Kate put the image away. There was another print out, once again of security camera footage, that showed Kyle being dragged out of what looked like an interrogation room while yelling at that camera. Her fingers felt numb as she touched the paper. Her father had rarely been around when she was a child; he'd been a welcome guest at home who always had to overcome an initial wall of resentment, and he had been a voice on the telephone, a clumsy author of letters. John's father had been a series of grainy images: a mug shot, struggling against police men, facing the thing that would kill him. Dead.

Kate stared at the next picture, the final one. A crime scene photo. And she had seen many, many dead people in her life, had watched them die or even helped them along. This was different. The dead person in that picture was still around, supporting his injured comrade a few rooms over. Clueless.

That wasn't all, and it wasn't the worst of it. There were a few more sheets in that box – not pictures but filled with text. Kate began to read and discovered, much to her horror, that she was holding an autopsy report.

Horrified though she was, her eyes were drawn along the lines almost against her will. The words gave her an idea, more so than John's incomplete second-hand report, of what Kyle and Sarah must have gone through before the terminator was destroyed. According to the report, there wasn't one injury that definitely killed him but rather an accumulation of wounds – broken bones, burns, the most prominent one a bullet hole in the right lung – that would have eventually been fatal without immediate treatment. The report also listed old injuries, like the extensive burns he sustained a few years ago, broken bones, plenty of grazes and cuts, and of course the bullet wounds to his chest and stomach that nearly killed him two years ago.

There were some comments about the lack of professional treatment those wounds had received, but Kate didn't have it in her to feel offended. They were operating in a bunker with very little supplies, no x-ray or even proper light. Of course her treatment didn't live up to hospital standards. That thought barely registered.

“Why did you keep this?” she asked, because it was horrible and she didn't understand.

John shrugged helplessly. “It's all I have.”

“No,” Kate said, sternly. Angry. She pointed at the door, in the direction of her clinic where even now Kyle was still shaking off the last effects of the poison that had killed Montag. “ _That_ is all you have!”

“It's not,” he insisted. “It can't be. If it where, how could I let _this_ happen?” He pointed at the papers in Kate's hands. And she was angry again, but not at him this time, but at the world, because she knew he was right.

  


-

  


Captain Jan was dead. Reese had taken in the information as a mere representation of facts that in some way impacted his life when he first heard about it. There hadn't been much emotion to it. He'd liked and respected her and knew in a strictly intellectual way that he would miss her, but so far the knowledge that she was gone hadn't sunk in yet, and he began to understand that it never would. The emotion was there, somewhere, but it was hidden and covered and inaccessible behind a wall that had been carefully, if unconsciously erected. When he'd been a child, he didn't have that. Now the discovery that the part of him that might be inhibited by loss was more or less gone filled him with some relief. It wasn't like he, or anyone else, would benefit from it.

He didn't wonder anymore if that would ever change. Not often, anyway. Most of the time he was too focused on his environment and the enemies he was fighting to think about the future, the past, or anything as inconsequential as his own feelings. When he wasn't fighting, he was simply too tired. Like now. He'd been holed up in the bunker for weeks on end while his body tried to recover its strength, and now he was out in the field again, battling for days on end, it seemed, and his body had forgotten what rest felt like.

The machines were once again closing in on various of their bases. Some could be given up, others had to be fought for, and right now that reminded Reese of the years with Perry; that endless battle out there that only ever got interrupted, never won.

Reese had lost track of the time he had spend outside, fighting. He'd only just come back to this bunker, a small one, not very important, but housing injured people and children who couldn't currently make the track to safer areas. The weather wouldn't let them. And if the army allowed the machines to close their ring around this terrain, they might never get a chance to make it out.

There were battles like this going on all over the place. The machines seemed to have tripled their efforts to get the last humans away from the city, and that was generally seen as a good sign, since it meant the last humans were actually seen as a threat, which meant Skynet was vulnerable. But there were people who really had to get out of here, and Reese hated the fact that they weren't already, because from now on that was only going to get harder.

Every soldier was fighting on all fronts right now. It wasn't much different than it had been all his life, but now the soldiers stationed at their main base had been reduced to the barest minimum, everyone else being out where the action was. The main base had never been completely safe, but ever since the interrupted attack Skynet had planned earlier this year, everyone was nervous. It didn't _feel_ safe anymore. Those who couldn't fight had barely any protection left, Skynet could try again at any time and there was no guarantee that they would notice in time again, and the empty halls where the civilians used to stay served as a constant reminder that the place was no longer a sanctuary.

As crowded as the bunker had been before, the emptiness brought little relief. Now the place felt abandoned, haunted even, like everyone still in there was a fool. Worse, it felt like a failure to protect those who had lived there. And even though protecting the inhabitants had been the idea behind sending them away, Reese knew that many of the groups traveling south hadn't made it.

Connor's team had been split for the time being, only five of them staying with their leader, while the others fought wherever they were needed. This was not a time for planning and strategizing, it was a pure struggle for survival. Yet, Connor still planned and strategized. It seemed like the man's mind never stood still, that he could come up with a way to remove a threat fifty kilometers away while fighting against three terminators at once.

Reese stopped his decent of the stairs when he heard an explosion far away. He listened, but there was no call for backup over the comm. Whoever was fighting over there had the situation under control.

His feet dragged over the concrete by now. He was so fucking tired, and just hoping for a chance to rest his feet and his eyes for a few moments. First he had to get inside, though. And make a report, even if it consisted of only three words. Three words seemed like a challenge right now.

Then again, three words were a challenge most of the time. Reese hoped he would never find himself in a situation where he had to do a lot of talking.

His thoughts began to drift in uncoordinated directions as he knocked on the door to the bunker and identified himself. The soldier on the other side acknowledged him with a tired nod, but still held on to his weapon until the dog also waiting on the other side identified him as human and familiar, as opposed to a terminator wearing his face. That had happened a few weeks ago: a long lost soldier had returned to base only to then shoot everyone and turn out to be filled with machinery upon being blown up. The imitation process had presumably taken longer than ten hours, but one could never be careful enough,

The commander of the base was currently in, and standing nearby. Reese reported back alive, told him where he had been, how many enemies he fought, what the general situation was. He had been out alone and there wasn't much to say. The commander send him to get something to eat and a few hours of sleep before he headed out again with new supplies. Reese was hungry, but mostly he was tired – so tired that even the thought of going over to supplies to grab a bite of rat or decades-old canned food was draining the energy out of him. So he just sank down on the first suitable spot he could find, thinking vaguely about how he would get his one scheduled meal per day later. (This was a great improvement to most of his life, when food was always priority over _anything_ because there was no guarantee it would be available later. Now Reese knew there would be enough to go by, and he knew his own limits and that he was still far from the point where hunger would inhibit his abilities.)

The bunker was so small that there was no completely closed off room at all, and every space was occupied by something or someone. Reese ended up sitting on the floor inside the room that also housed the dogs. There were two in the bunker: one currently watching the entrance, the other here. It was a large animal, old and looking skinny but Reese knew how strong it was. That strength wouldn't do anything against their enemies. It was just an observation.

The dog came over to him when he sat down to lean against the wall, and he lifted his arm to let it settle at his side. The warm body was a welcome sensation, an easy sort of trust and comfort that he allowed himself to burrow into for a short time. The dog whined softly as he scratched it behind the ears, then stroked its dirty fur. For a while they sat silently, just enjoying each other's company. Reese regretted not having anything to feed to this animal that was helping them fight their war. Surely it was hungry, too.

The only thing that Reese had with him, though, that wasn't explosive or sharp, was the Polaroid image of Sarah Connor that John had given him a while ago. He'd told him to hold on to it, and Reese had – more than John could possibly imagine. In the weeks he had been battling the fever while his team had been out getting killed by machines, when he had felt his body try to shut down on him and was so tired it was tempting to let it, he held on to that picture, studied the lines of Sarah's face, the sadness in it that told its own story and could never leave this frozen moment, and thought about how she had never given up, no matter how hard it was, how tired she had to be. She'd been an inspiration to keep up the struggle, more so than she was anyway, to anyone. Now Reese always carried the photo with him, and even though he had studied it so often every line of her face was etched into his memory, he was reluctant to let it go.

He touched his breast pocket now, to feel if it was still there. It was – it hadn't been lost during his battles today. An eternal worry of him. Reese knew that as long as he carried it with him, the chance was there that the photograph would be lost or destroyed, but he didn't have any other place to leave it.

This time, he didn't pull it out. He buried his hands in the dog's fur instead, trying to warm them, and let his thoughts drift until he fell asleep.


	34. 2029

Everyone was tired. John could see it in all the faces, everywhere he went. And he had traveled far since the beginning of the year. Gone all the way to Arizona, to New Mexico, to the North of California that he had never visited before in this life. He'd stopped in bunkers all over the land, some so small, so cramped and so dilapidated it had come as a shock even to him, and the excitement and awe his visit inspired in soldiers who so far knew him only by name had been humbling. He had spend too much time in the same spot, among the same people. Many of these people he had talked to over the communication lines, but this was the first time they ever met.

Out here, he learned, they felt like they were barely holding the line while all the important things happened elsewhere, and that as long as the lines were held, no one would notice if they died. They felt inconsequential, and John Conner showing up there to grace them with his presence was enough to change that. He never had the heart to tell anyone, not even their commanders, that he hadn't come for them.

He'd come for the scavengers, the people still in hiding, surviving in the ruins without being part of the army. He came for them, and not for the ones who had been faithfully fighting with him all along, because he needed them and already had the others. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair or just that without his need for those who had so far been comfortable to let others carry the load he wouldn't have made the time to come here at all. So he didn't tell them, once he realized how much his visit meant to them. He couldn't give them what they deserved, but he could give them the illusion.

So he made it look like his trips to the settlements around where a bonus activity that he took up just because he happened to be in the area and it was a convenient chance, rather than the other way round. If anyone called the bluff, they kept it to themselves.

The settlements reacted to his visit in various ways. Almost all of them had some kind of contact with the army stationed nearby, so they were used to soldiers coming in to trade for food and other supplies, and to recruit more people into their ranks. At this point, anyone who could be talked into leaving had already left. Those still around welcomed John with mixed feelings, well aware that he hadn't come for new blankets.

He did not just give a speech, although he did that sometimes as well. He also listened to the reasons the scavengers listed for not going out to fight. Some were excuses. Some of them where simply too afraid, or too selfish to go out and risk their lives more than they had to when someone else could do it for them. But others had legitimate reasons. For example that their settlements housed young children and people too weak to take care of themselves, and if all the capable fighters left, who would protect them and care for them? John could accept that as a valid concern. But he couldn't accept that they wouldn't fight, not now.

He could give these people assurances that their families would be safe, but not a lot of them. The better thing he could give them was the promise that if they all helped now, this war would be over so soon they families would be safe anyway. If the army launched its last great assault on Skynet's core in L.A., the machines would concentrate all their activities there and have no time to wipe out any hidden settlements or attack those looking for food in the ruins. And after their victory, it would be over and they could all come home and start to rebuild the world instead of hiding from it.

He couldn't make promises, though. And the scavengers argued, understandably, that if they went to fight and lost, those left behind would be helpless, whereas if they stayed out of the fighting, they could keep their settlements going beyond the fall of the army.

But that would only prolong the inevitable. If their final battle was lost, there would be no army anymore, and the machines would have nothing to stop them from swarming the country and systematically taking out every last bit of human life they could find. And without the help of every single person capable of fighting standing up against them this last time, the chances of losing where a hell of a lot higher. So John didn't really present these people with a choice. He merely explained to them why they didn't have any,

Fortunately, he was very convincing. Almost everyone agreed to be there. They agreed to leave now, because the way to L.A. was long. The only ones who did not go where those who refused out of fear or selfishness; who decided that they could survive this thing unharmed if only enough others went to die for them. There was nothing John could do but make them feel horrible about themselves, hoping their conscience would kick in before it was too late. Some where on the edge. Others wouldn't come, and they would live on in relative safety while better people died for them. There was nothing John could do about that.

With luck, they would have enough. John wasn't taking it for granted. He knew many would die before that battle, anyway.

While he was touring, so was Hernandez. They covered a lot of ground, but in the end had to rely on others to spread the word for them. The troops stationed far from L.A. would stay where they were as late as possible, then make their way towards the city when the time came. Until then, there were preparations to be made.

John had hoped all his life that the war would end early in 2019. January. January the first, ideally. By now he had to accept that it would be more like November, December. It was so close, all things considered, and yet it felt so far away. So much could happen. And everyone was tired.

John was tired, too.

It was March now. End of March. He was on his way back to their H.Q., but there would be more stops to make, and he would need at least another two months. Then two months to plan and execute another mission that was crucial for the success of their final assault. And then they'd need at least one more month until everyone was in position. But that was hypothetical planning, assuming everything would go perfectly. It wouldn't. It never did. Fighting was going on everywhere, the machines desperate now to push back the army and strike their bases and the army desperate not to let them, and every battle was a delay. John calculated about two months in addition to their ideal plan. It could easily be much more than that, and the only reason why he didn't pessimistically assumed that would be the case was because he knew the war had to end before the turn of the year.

He was on the return journey, close to L.A., but coming in from the North; the entire city between him and their home base. There was a long way still ahead of him, but not a lot of stops, as most of the scavengers camps in this area were deserted or had already joined the army. And in case of the remaining ones, the bunkers in this area often held soldiers who originated from those camps and could go back there to convince the others, maybe better than John could. His political mission was mostly over. But the machines were very present in this area, and John and his men couldn't just run through without helping in the fight. Sometimes because they had to, as Skynet had effectively blocked their way back.

They were also picking up a few of their comrades who had stayed at these bases for the past months, helping out where they were needed, but were needed more now to come back with John and help with the preparation and the protection of their HQ. They had moved around a good bit during this time and it was kind of a coincidence who they could collect on their way, and who had to make the way back on their own.

This place, this tiny bunker that had belonged to civilians before the army moved in here and still belonged to civilians now, hiding out between the armed forces, was where John planned to reunite with Kyle before they moved on tomorrow. Kyle had been here for a week, was currently out fighting with some of the soldiers from this place, and probably didn't know that John had arrived in his absence. John and his companions had had to fight to get here. The situation outside was bad. Even now he could hear the sound of plasma fire in the distance, striking some unseen target from above.

The bunker was just one long corridor with rooms branching off left and right. Every adult here was a soldier and every child knew for certain what they would be once old enough, and didn't seem to know enough about the world to imagine anything else. Or maybe they knew too much. John watched gaunt, slumped people wander the corridor, in and out of rooms, watched two young men hunting for rats, and in between that children playing war. Forming guns out of their fingers and trying to time their “shots” with the noise of the fire outside. This, he realized, was normal. There was no elevated sense of worry about the fighting being so close. It was just the background noise of their lives.

John was just about the resume his discussion with Dugan, the commander of this base, when the door at the far end of the corridor was opened and a bunch of soldiers came in, Kyle among them. They were far away and the light was bad, but John would recognize him anywhere by this point. Kyle's hair was sticking out this way and that underneath his headband as he let the dog at the entrance sniff his hand and signed his name in the ledger they used to keep track on who was out and who was in.

He didn't notice John at the other end of the corridor. He didn't seem to notice much of anything. To John, he looked dead on his feet, and yet he stopped for a moment to engage in an imaginary gunfight with a little girl watching him go by from one of the chambers on the side. John noted it with a pang of wistfulness and regret. It was like catching a glance at the father Kyle would have been, the father John would never have. Then Kyle found a spot on the floor that wasn't taken by anything important and sank down, obviously too exhausted to go any further and look for a better place to rest than right there, on the ground, in the middle of everything.

John expected him to fall asleep on the spot, just slump into himself and fall silent and still until he needed to move again, but he fumbled with his vest first, and pulled out a small piece of paper that he unfolded and gazed at like it was holy scripture. John couldn't see what it was from this far away. He knew what it was.

Somewhere, a few rooms over, a woman was crying; a rhythmic, steady sound that had been going on forever.

John stared down the corridor, frozen and deaf to everyone trying to get his attention, until the barking of the dogs tore him out of his on personal hell and into another one.

  


-

  


They were on a truck going west six hours later; half a day earlier than they had planned. The terminators infiltrating that bunker had done a lot of damage, killed a few people. Soldiers who'd fought them. Children who had played in those rooms just minutes earlier. John's head felt empty even now, when all he could do was listen to the rumble of the truck. They had managed to take out the threat within three minutes and put out the fires within seven. All things considered, it could have been worse.

Right now, Dugan and his troops were moving in on the source of those infiltrator units, desperate to get rid of the nest. Things would get ugly there very soon, and John and his men needed to get out of the area while they still could. If they stayed to help, the delay might be longer than their plans allowed.

The truck shook and rumbled. It was uncomfortable, but comfortably familiar. Kyle, who had been sitting beside John in silence for the longest time, eventually listed to the side as exhaustion finally got the better of him, leaning against John's shoulder and eventually ending up with this head in John's lab – something unthinkable had he been awake. John didn't mind. He thought about the photograph of his mother, now lost to the flames. He thought about his mother. He remembered the way Kyle had looked at that picture, and thought about how John could never tell him that the last thing Sarah said before she died had been his name.

They reached the next bunker half a day later. Cold, dank air, no light. Everyone was gone from here, probably dead on the battlefields. John and the others checked the abandoned rooms carefully – sometimes the machines used gas that lingered – but there were no bodies, no odd smell but that of space left behind. They would stop here for a day or two and see if any of the three settlements within two hours of this base still existed.

There were just seven of them now; they found the small bedroom with mattresses and cots and moved in there, in the lights of their headlamps, never reactivating the base's generator. It was too late to go anywhere in this terrain today. They needed to plan this, expecting traps, expecting to find the settlements dead, and they needed to re-evaluate whether or not finding out for sure was worth the risk of going there. Most of all, they needed sleep. Kyle was one of the first to lay down, as soon as John told them they could. He'd seemed to have gone through the past few hours in a daze, and when he slept, curled up on his side, he was as still as John had ever seen him.

He'd inhaled smoke during the attack, had suffered some minor burns. Maybe that was wearing him down, or maybe he was just exhausted from weeks of relentless fighting, or maybe he was simply at the end of his rope. John watched him sleep and thought that he only needed to hang on for another six or seven months and hated himself for it.

The next day they went out for the settlements. All three of them were empty, but only one held dead bodies. Lots of machines around on the surface of this land, stomping over ruins and human remains. They lost one man to an ambush. They moved on.

Two days to the next base, where they picked up Estelle Marini, who had already convinced everyone in the nearest camp of scavs to join their fight. All of those were now on their way to the east. John allowed himself and his men five hours to sleep and eat something, then they left for the next station.

  


-

  


Reese's hand wandered to the pocket of his vest, where once he had held the photograph of Sarah Connor. It was a habit now, a meaningless gesture, that even after six months he hadn't been able to drop. Too often had he made that movement in the short time he'd held her image – not even taking it out, just finding comfort in the knowledge that it was there. That, in itself, had been meaningless, too. It had been just a picture. He hadn't been safer for having it, nor had his life changed in any way for having lost it. There had simply been some comfort in it that he wouldn't be able to explain if anyone asked. It had been something tangible to hold on to that he was missing now, even though he didn't need the photograph anymore to know what Sarah looked like, having long since memorized every line of her face, that look in her eyes as she gazed into the distance. He'd never know what her voice had sounded like.

He was probably in love, he thought.

An alarm ringing through the halls made him look up and reach for his weapon, but it died again within thirty seconds. Lately, alarms sounded all the time. Their base was on the verge of being discovered. Last month Skynet had send five aerial H.K.s to bomb them with heavy explosives that would get them even down here; bury them alive if they couldn't crush them outright. It had gotten the location wrong and there had been no casualties, but even so the bombs had hit close enough that they all felt the bunker shudder and groan under their impact.

Now the sirens went off whenever an aerial approached the base as if it knew where they were. The shortness of this alarm told Reese that it had turned around before it got too close, and he relaxed again, too tired from the constant tension to let the moment linger. Everyone was this tired of being wary, and he wondered if that would be their downfall one day. That was why he had forced himself to react at once and get ready to fight and help organize everyone's escape through the tunnels when the siren sounded, even though he had known it probably was another false alarm.

Men and women hurried past him on their way to the exit he had just come in through a few minutes ago. They were armed; everyone was carrying their arms at all time now, when previously it had been forbidden in most parts of this large underground complex. It was crowded again, but almost every person here was a soldier, and the few who were not were necessary for their support.

John and Kate's son Casey was the only one still here who was under the age of ten. These days he was very busy, making supply runs from from one storage to the next, helping with the cleaning of the place that still had to be done to a barest minimum, and even helping his mother and sister with taking care of the wounded. He still avoided too much contact with people outside his family wherever he could, though. Whenever Reese saw him in medical, it was a bit of a surprise, and whenever Casey saw him, his face lit up and he stuck close to him as if his presence gave him comfort.

Kyle didn't know what he had done to deserve that trust, but he would be lying it he said it made him unhappy, even if sometimes he didn't know how to handle it. It was almost like having a younger brother, he suspected. All three of John's children had been very kind to him despite all the problems he had caused. John and Kate, too. Reese owed them a lot, but all he had to give was his loyalty.

To him they were the closest thing to family he would ever get, but he was under no illusions that the feeling was mutual. They did have a real family, after all. Reese existed somewhere in the periphery of that, and that was enough for him.

He did wonder, however, what would happen after the war, when his identity as a soldier became obsolete. Where he would end up, if any of the people in his life would remain there without necessity throwing them together.

His stomach growled. Necessity demanded that he ate, but he didn't have to do that right now. Reese could go hungry for a long time without losing much of his efficiency, and as of this moment, he had to get to medical and allow Kate to check out the cut on his forearm. It was itching under the bandage, which he took as a sign that it was healing alright. Kate wanted to check on it and remove the stitches before he left on the upcoming mission that would take him out of the base for weeks. Reese thought she was making too big a thing out of so small an injury. He'd told her that he could take care of that himself out in the field, but she had insisted. “Your mission is important. We can't risk losing you halfway through it to an infection that could easily have been prevented by you moving your ass to my clinic for five minutes,” she'd said, and there had really been no way to argue that.

Still he was determined to leave again should medical be too crowded. There was no time for him to wait for long, and his issue not worth letting someone else wait over. But there wasn't much going on when he came, which surprised him a little. Everyone was fighting all the time now, even more so than ever before. There was a steady stream of injuries. And yet, only two people where in the treatment room being seen to, and only one of the beds in the back was taken.

He only had to wait a few minutes, and Kate had seen him already so he didn't have a choice but to do that. Fortunately, his wounds had healed well and shouldn't cause much trouble anymore. Reese was glad to be rid of the bandage. He was planning on getting clean one last time in the washrooms before the mission, and it would have gotten in the way.

Louisa was in the back. Reese heard her voice, talking to the woman on the bed, but he didn't see her. The injured woman he didn't know. Many unknown faces in the bunker these days.

Casey was out running an errand right now, Kate told him without prompting. Jeanette was out fighting, but her troop was on the way back and Jeannie was unhurt. Kate knew that because she kept taps on her daughter as best she could, and Reese was grateful that she passed this information on to him without him having to ask, knowing and accepting that it mattered to him if they were safe.

There was no time to linger, though. Reese thanked Kate and hurried to the washroom, well aware that he had only ten hours before they had to leave again, and most of that would be spend checking and restocking his equipment, and trying to get some sleep. Most of all, though, he wanted to be done with washing before the next large group came back to fill the area. At this time, there was a chance the place would be deserted.

With the change in their routine after the prevented attack on their base and the departure of the civilians, the washrooms were now open and available all the time. Still there were times when no one used them. Personal hygiene was a lot less important to basically everyone than, for example, food or rest. Reese only decided to make use of his chance now because it would be weeks before he got another opportunity to truly wash the dirt off his body with warm water and soap. In fact, the next time he did it, the war might by over.

Excitement ran through him at the though, but he fought it down. There was no point being too happy about something that hadn't happened yet and never might.

For now there was the room (deserted as hoped) and the task of warming up water. Reese didn't get it hot, just warm enough not to be too unpleasant. He still shivered at lot when he climbed out of the tub, because the air was chilly and now he was wet. He hurried to amend that – rubbed off the water and slipped back into his pants and shirt, with the remaining water dripping down from his hair. He tried to get that dry as well, leaving it a mess that stuck out in all directions. His hair fell to his shoulders and saw a brush only very rarely. He usually tied it back, but doing that now, when it was wet and hopelessly tangled proved unpleasant. He was still trying to get the worst knots out with his fingers when he noticed movement behind him.

Reese recognized his General and friend before the fight of flight reflex could fully form. His heart still jumped, but he was fairly certain it didn't show.

“You should cut it,” John said when Reese gave up and tied his hair back despite how uncomfortable it was.

“I have no knife here,” Reese replied. That was basically his entire reason for the hair being so long. Cutting it off was a nuisance he rarely remembered, and it was easier when the hair was long enough to grab all at once and just cut it off with one swipe. Some of the others shaved theirs, but he found that too time consuming and would miss the extra layer of protection from the cold. He hoped it wouldn't fall out when he got old and expose his skull to the elements, since it was unlikely this winter would ever truly end during his lifetime.

John didn't reply. He walked over to the wall where a first aid kit was mounted and took it off. Opened it, procured a pair of scissors. Gestured to one of the plastic chairs that stood in the room so their clothes didn't need to lie on the floor while they washed. “Sit down,” he ordered.

  


-

  


Kyle sat. If he thought this was weird, he didn't say anything. It was weird. Just fooling around among friends, one doing the other a favor. To Kyle it might be weird because John was also his commanding officer. John started by roughly cutting through the messy strands until everything was a good bit shorter, then did his best to even it out.

He was working as quickly as he could. No one cared if anyone had a proper haircut in this time and age. John needed Kyle to wear his hair in a way that didn't immediately stand out in the eighties.

“You never spoke of your parents,” he said; his mouth was running away from him, he didn't think until he spoke that his words might be insensitive. He needed to distract himself from what he was doing and why. He knew this was probably the last chance he'd ever had to learn about his grandparents. “Do you remember them at all?”

Kyle made a vague gesture. “A little,” he said. “Very little.” And that was probably good – it might mean that the topic wasn't too sensitive, that Kyle wasn't too upset about the loss of people he hardly remembered. “The oldest memory I have is of losing them,” he continued. “It's the only thing I remember from before the camp. We were running from a hunter killer that was after us, and my father was hit and then fell. I think he yelled at my mother to keep running. The H.K. must have run him over. I didn't see it.” He was silent for second, and very still. “Then my mother ran into a tunnel with me, but I couldn't keep up with her and fell. I hid while the H.K. kept going, after her. I tried to find her later, but didn't.” Again he fell silent, while John tried to think of anything to say.

“Was that long before the camp?” he finally asked, because he didn't know how to give comfort here any more than Kyle would have known how to take it.

“No, I was captured the same day. I...” He trailed off, started again. “My father looked at us from where he had fallen, and my mother was carrying me at the time so I was facing him as she ran. I remember the look on his face – every detail. Just this one image. But my mother carried me, and then she dragged me along by the hand, and I was only looking at the road before us. When I fell I saw her back. She had light, very curly hair.” John imagined the scene. Kyle's own hair fell to the tiles.

“Later on the transport to the camp, I met a woman named Alyssa. She was kind to me, and later helped me escape when the machines would have sorted me out. They killed her. I knew her for a day, most of which we spend in darkness. But I remember her name and her face, and the sound of her voice. All I remember about my mother is the way her hair moved as she ran away.”

John stopped cutting. He was done anyway. “She left you behind.”

Kyle shrugged. “She had to. I don't know if the machine got her. I hope she's still alive somewhere.”

“But she left you there! She ran away!”

“She probably didn't even notice.”

“How can you not notice that?”

“By being so afraid that you can only think of the thing that's after you.” Kyle turned around and looked at John, and suddenly he looked like an adult giving an explanation to a child. “Maybe that never happened to you, but if you live out there, you're always afraid. And when something's after you, you run. You stop for nothing. You're so afraid that you can't focus on anything but to get away. I probably would have done the same thing.”

“You wouldn't,” John said. He shook his head. “I know you wouldn't.”

Kyle looked at him for a moment, then he looked at the floor. “If she hadn't run, the H.K. would have gotten both of us. Senseless sacrifice. I don't blame her.”

John did. In his opinion, Kyle gave his mother entirely too much credit.

It was amazing, wasn't it, the things they forgave their parents for.

Their family.

John's thoughts turned back to his own mother, circled around her, eventually settling on that memory of her talking about Kyle and how he had said, in the voice of absolute conviction, that he would die for John Connor. She had seemed proud, of the man their son would turn into, and of her lover's loyalty. John had mostly found it intimidating, because how could he ever live up to such devotion? For the past few years he had found that, deserved or not, Kyle did give him that loyalty, unquestioningly, and a part of him had reveled in it – Kyle would never get to love him as a father, but he loved him none the less. It was as close as John would get. When they spoke about Sarah these days, with John remembering the mother she had been and the way she had never stopped thinking of his father, and Kyle already in love with her, had been the closest they would ever get to being the family John had wished for growing up.

Now he wondered if Kyle would be as willing to die for him if he had known that John had relied on that since before they ever met.

(Maybe, though. Maybe he could still change it. Without risking anything. Without endangering the time line. Not change what his life was based on – just save Kyle. Make Sarah not call her mother and let him live. John would try. He would give that information as soon as he could, as soon as it would make sense to Kyle, and then he would sit here and hope for the best. See if anything had changed. It was a slim, desperate hope but he couldn't not do it. He had spend too much time feeling helpless.)

He put away the scissors, handed Kyle his jacket, and was acutely aware that this was probably the last time they were together like this.

Kyle's hair was too short now to match the pictures John had in his box. Just a little bit. It would grow long enough during the mission he was about to begin; the one that would, if anything could, win them the war.

Years ago, when he'd still been with the 132nd, Kyle had been part of the team that had traveled around sabotaging the relay stations of the machines, to see if the army could feed them with their own orders. They could, and yet so far they never had, saving the opportunity this gave them for the one time they would need it more than at any other point. This time was now. If all went well, during the final battle, many of the machines simply wouldn't fight them. Some would fight each other. Provided Kyle managed to lead his team to enough of the stations without getting killed, and provided the reprogramming worked.

The would then meet up with John and everyone else for the final attack. The next time they met, the war would be almost over.

For now, there was still a long way to go. And their ways needed to separate here, for a while. John couldn't think of anything left to say, so he clapped Kyle's shoulder and wished him luck, not watching as he walked out of the room.

  


-

  


Kyle's group of ten met with the rest of the army at the collection point just outside L.A. on December 17th, 2029, being among the last to arrive. They met Skynet's final line of defense one day later. The year John had always known they would, and much later than he had hoped. Two weeks left until the end of the prophesied time window. He went into this battle knowing they would win.

It had taken months of organization, orientation, and sabotage to set the stage for this battle. A year to get everyone, every single person who could fight, to this point, at this time. Nine years of gathering information, scouting out the place, looking for weaknesses and learning all about Skynet and its defense grit and where to strike. Thirty-two years, three months, and nineteen days of war.

The final battle takes a night.

This was what all these preparations boiled down to. A fight they could win. A fight that was, after everything, not even that hard.

It shouldn't have been. That was what they had gone through so much trouble for, after all. That was why they had gathered an army bigger than any fighting force they ever had before in over thirty years for this one moment. So that most of them would live.

Not all did. Many died – torn apart by plasma fire or grenades or mines. Mowed down by H.K.s. For hours, John was in the middle of what felt like death; someone dead or dying wherever he looked. Never did he see anyone fall back. All of them knew that they had to break this one line, and they wouldn't get another chance. This was all or nothing; retreat wouldn't save anyone, and that was what they fought like. And no matter how many fell, whenever John had a moment to breathe, he was surprised by how many were left.

The reprogramming of the machines kicked in around midnight. Suddenly they started to turn on the other machines. Only a small percentage of them was influenced by their sabotage, but they did a lot of damage before they were taken out, and during that time, they drew the fire of the other machines, leaving them open to attacks from the humans. Just before dawn, the battle was over.

There was still fighting going on. John could hear shots fired and things blowing up not all that far, but by now that was almost an aftermath. The part of the defense line that mattered was broken. And he wondered, as he stormed into the complex they had blown open at the head of his men, if this hadn't been too easy. If Skynet hadn't, perhaps, not thrown all it had into this battle because there was a plan B that was more important.

They entered the complex and it was empty. Every robot and cyborg that had been in here had joined the fight and was now a smoldering heap outside the building. The halls before them were vast; much bigger than he had expected, almost twice the size of the testing ground they had found before. Displays blinked on the walls. Screens showed figures and numbers. There was no telling how long ago that contraption in the center had been used. It didn't matter. That was the beauty of time travel. Technically, it could have been a year. As long as the army send someone back to the same point as Skynet's assassin, there was no reason to hurry.

It couldn't have been long ago, though. Skynet had bothered to defend this place, probably to delay them. And the machines would probably have destroyed it as soon as the terminator went through, if the army had let them.

And now John couldn't stop thinking about how, had the terminator succeeded, this time, this moment in history would never have happened. They wouldn't be standing here. Wouldn't everything have changed the moment the T-800 was send back in time, completely regardless of how long he needed in the past to track down Sarah and kill her?

Considering all that, did Skynet know already that its last plan had failed?

Well, if so, it would do everything to keep John's army away from this equipment, on the chance that it would make the plan work after all. Or something. John had no idea how changes would play out and spread through time if they ever actually occurred, since all this was already part of the game.

He did know that they had little time, because Skynet was dying, was minutes away from being blown up less than six hundred meters from here, and it would concentrate all its efforts on this facility. If it could prevent John from sending someone after its cyborg-assassin, it didn't matter if its core got blown up first, since its own end would be written out of history soon enough.

There was little time, so John didn't waste any. He gave everyone half a minute to filter into the complex and stare at the equipment around them with wide eyes and useless guns. Not long, and someone would start shooting at it, on the ground that Skynet had created it so it couldn't be good.

“Reminds me of the complex we found last year,” Justin Perry said beside John, making him turn. Justin had a gash on his forehead, the blood running into his eye and making him half blind. He looked grim, but elated at the same time. Grim, because everyone who'd fallen today had come so close to making it. Elated because it was over.

Something big exploded in the distance.

Behind Justin, Kyle wandered along a line of metal tubes, half-turned towards the entrance, always keeping an eye open for everyone and everything that might come in there. Always vigilant.

John closed his eyes for a second, before, addressing the whole room, he said, “Listen.”

  


-

  


“We do not have much time so I'll get to the point. What you see here,” John said, his voice carrying in the large hall so that everyone heard, “is time displacement equipment. It's meant to send people – or machines – back in time. Skynet has already used it, probably just minutes ago, to send back a T-800 infiltration unit to the year 1984. It's objective is to kill my mother, Sarah Connor, before she can give birth to me. With this, the machines aim to rewrite history by taking out a main player, hoping that without me, the army will never form and Skynet will never be defeated. If we don't do anything, they will succeed.”

Murmuring everywhere. Some incredulous comments. Kyle could only stare at John, suddenly overcome by fear for this woman who was thirty years dead, as a part of him accepted without question that her fate was in their hands.

“That's science fiction,” someone called.

“We have laser guns,” someone else pointed out.

“How would you know that, General?” Estelle Marini asked. She was leaning against a wall, holding her badly burned shoulder. John now turned his attention to her, his expression unchanging.

“I know because my mother told me.”

Noise erupted all over the room, with everyone talking at once. Reese didn't say anything, but he was thinking everything at once, so that he couldn't clearly grasp a single thought. (There may have been a realization somewhere in there.)

“It doesn't matter if some of you don't believe me,” John continued, and everyone immediately fell silent. “We don't have time for a discussion, or for explanations. What matters now is that someone needs to follow the terminator through _that_ ,” - he pointed at the large structure that dominated the back of the hall - “and take it out before it can complete its mission. I cannot go myself, so I need a volunteer. Anyone here who wants to meet the great Sarah Connor in person?”

Reese lifted his hand before he had time to think any more. He wasn't hung up on the science fiction aspect of this setting. All his life, he had been enslaved by or had fought robots and cyborgs, many of which could fly. Time travel? Whatever.

But the chance to actually meet Sarah Connor, that was the truly surreal thing about this. For so long she had meant so much to him, but actually meeting her in person had been far outside the realm of the possible. So this was something he didn't need to think about. He had to try, even though he knew the choice would fall on someone else. Someone older, more experienced. It was obvious. But he had to offer.

Around him, several hands went up as well.

John looked at all of them. “You must know this is a very dangerous mission, and your willingness to take that risk honors you. But I have to warn you. This is a one-way trip. There is no time displacement equipment in the past that can send you back. If you go, you will never return here.”

Some of the hands disappeared. Reese's stayed up. Somewhere behind him, someone pointed out that trading this world for the Glorious Past was pretty acceptable, but that wouldn't console those who had family here, or lovers.

This world was shit, but it was their world; they had finally won it back, and whoever would go on this mission would never see what it would turn into. Reese wanted very much to see that. But his hand stayed up.

“Everyone who knows they won't go, get to work!” John ordered. “We have less than half an hour to get everything done, so get familiar with those controls, figure out how all this works. I can already tell you, though,” - and here he turned back to those not swarming out to the screens and control platforms surrounding them - “that only organic matter can pass through the portal. No weapons. If you go, you won't have plasma guns, or EMP charges. It will be just you and that terminator, in a world that offers little in the way of weapons that can actually harm it.”

That wasn't good. Without proper weapons, a human had very little chance against a T-800. In addition to that, they wouldn't even know what to look for. The terminator would try to blend in while it got close to Sarah, and there were so many people back then. Too many crowds. Sarah's protector couldn't just go up to her and reveal himself either, because that would give their presence away to the enemy. The terminator would then take out the soldier John send and nothing would stand between it and Sarah...

There were still a few hands up. Perry had taken his down, and Reese was glad – he had people here who needed him. The _world_ would need him. And he was injured; any kind of limitation could easily be fatal on this mission, and cost more than just the soldier's life. But there were others still offering who had gotten through the last fight without injury, and who where older, old enough even to be familiar with the world one of them would be send to. So Reese was so surprised he nearly flinched when John said, “Sergeant Reese.”

Reese dropped his hand and stood a little straighter. Around him, everyone else dropped their hands as well and looked at him.

“Are you absolutely sure, Kyle?” John asked. He had never called Reese by his given name in the field before.

And Reese thought of Louisa and her siblings and her mother, of Sommer and Naya and all the others he would never see again now. He wouldn't even know if they made it. He would never see this world rebuild. But he also thought of Sarah (was always thinking of Sarah), and how this was the only chance to tell her how much she meant to him, to all of them. Most of all he thought about how John needed him to do this, so he could live and Skynet wouldn't triumph, and there was nothing, absolutely nothing he wouldn't do for this man.

If it hadn't been Sarah, Reese would still have stood here, offering to go, because John Connor had asked him to.

“Yes, Sir,” he said, his voice steady.

John took a deep breath. His eyes never left Reese even as the soldier tried to figure out why he'd chosen him – what qualified him over everyone else? This was too important to just send anyone, and there were good people trying to get this job.

Maybe it was because Reese knew, better than anyone, what Sarah Connor looked like at that age. He had given him that photo of her back then, for seemingly no reason, and Reese hadn't understood why...

“Alright,” John said, interrupting his thought and calling everyone's attention. “Let's get to work, then.”

  


-

  


Movement was frantic, all around. John wanted to go to Kyle, spend these last minutes with him and tell him everything he needed to know, but there were other places he was needed more urgently, and he couldn't, _couldn't_ let personal feelings dictate his actions here.

Every person who knew how to operate a keyboard was needed at the control platforms, and that included John. He had always been quite good at hacking into systems, although this was a far cry from the archives he had broken into in the 1990s.

Not that many skills were needed. The machines hadn't bothered with much security, and even the equations for the time jump were still there on a screen.

“That's convenient,” John mused, glad this would be dealt with swiftly. He looked over his shoulder and saw Kyle at the other end of the room, handing his weapons over to Justin, who talked to him with a grim expression and kept throwing glares 0in John's direction. “So we just have to switch it on and send him through?”

“I wish it were that easy,” the man at the controls said. John knew him fleetingly but didn't remember his name. He was standing with a woman named Bellini, whom he knew to have been a science teacher before the war; the kind of person they were going to need when they rebuild this world and the kind of person they desperately needed _now_. “You see, as far as we can tell, considering we've had ten minutes to look at this, this device sends an object-”

“A person,” John corrected.

“A person, yes, a living organism not only through time but also through space. Which is a good thing. What do you think would happen if it just send you back in time, say, thirty years?”

“I would end up in this room thirty years ago,” John answered impatiently. He didn't have the patience for being educated. “Or in the place where this building would be later.”

“That's what anyone thinks,” Bellini told him. “Because everyone forgets that Earth isn't stationary in space. It's moving around the sun, and it's falling through the vacuum along with the solar system. So what would happen is that you would end up in space where this room would be thirty years later, and very dead. And even without that, there would be the Earth's rotation to consider, so you could end up on the planet, but the middle of the ocean, or inside a wall in Australia.”

That indeed complicated things. “But the machines already put coordinates in there.”

“Yeah, but they are static and using the momentary present as their constant,” the man explained. “Which means they became useless a second after the terminator was send through. Even if they weren't, even if they would reliably send someone to the exact same time and place, that would be fatal, because your volunteer would materialize inside the terminator as they'd both occupy the same space at the same moment.”

“Which would take the terminator out, probably,” Bellini mused. “But that's not an option.”

 _No, it's not_ , John thought. “So what do we do? Can you do this?”

“Oh, of course,” the man replied, full of confidence. “Can we do it within the few minutes that you gave us? That's gonna be hard. The boys over there have disconnected this terminal from Skynet's general control so we can use it as a giant calculator, so that helps, but even so you need to understand that Skynet's computing power is way above anything we can do here. It probably send its assassin back to a perfect spot with a perfect landing. Us, we can get the day and the city right, but when it comes to the landing, there's a chance we're sending that kid into a wall or the floor.”

John shuddered. He hadn't foreseen this. “Err on the side of caution, then,” he snapped, then he walked away. They needed more time, he thought desperately. _He_ needed more time.

On the other side of the room, Kyle had gotten rid of all his equipment, but kept on his pants and shirt so far. It was very cold in here. He'd strip naked no sooner than he absolutely had to.

His comm cracked to life. The team invading Skynet's core was minutes away from blowing it up. They were setting their explosives now. And there was no way to stall for time, not without risking them getting stopped at the last moment. John didn't tell them to take it easy. He sped up his steps, nearly jogging over to Kyle and the ones preparing him for his last trip.

At least two of them had been part of the team that had investigated the testing facility they had found last year. This technology wasn't all new to them, which was probably currently saving the planet. “It all makes more sense now that we know what it's for, Sir,” one of them explained to John, but he lifted his hand and signaled them to wait.

“Are you ready, Soldier?” he forced himself to ask. “We have less then five minutes.”

“I'm ready, Sir.” Kyle looked over at the large, imposing contraption that would soon swallow him. John was not going to give him the odds of materializing in solid matter or space. “Is there anything you want me to tell your mother?”

Was there? Thousands of things, John thought. This was the part where he gave Kyle a message to memorize, and he had no idea what to say. What could he say that would be of any use for his young, terrified mother? What could he say that wouldn't break anything?

 _'I'm sorry,'_ he thought. _'I wish I didn't have to put this on you. I'm sorry about Kyle. You were never perfect but your were the best you could be under the circumstances and I hope you'll know that I always loved you even when I was mad at you.'_

“Thank you, Sarah, for your courage through the dark years,” he dictated. “I can't help you with what you must soon face, except to say that the future is not set. You must be stronger than you imagine you can be. You must survive, or I will never live.”

Painfully inadequate. He desperately tried to come up with something more, something better than just warnings and the thanks of a stranger, but he had run out of words and was running out of time. “Do you have that?”

Kyle repeated it, word for word. John nodded. “Good.”

“Was there any word on Jeanette?” Kyle asked as they walked over to the bridge leading to the actual time travel device where Bellini and her companions were frantically entering data into a terminal. “Is she okay?”

The question startled John for a moment, before he realized that for Kyle this was the last chance to find out. If he got no answer now, he would never learn whether Jeannie had survived the war or not.

“I heard from her earlier,” he replied, quickly, before his throat could tighten too much to speak. “She's alive and seems to be okay.”

It was mostly the truth, in a way. John hadn't heard from Jeannie directly, but her commanding officer had passed on a list of the fallen from his troop, and her name had not been on it.

Kyle smiled, relieved. John expected him to give some message to Jeannie and the others now, some sort of goodbye, but he didn't, and John was left wondering if it had really sunk in what he was doing yet.

Bellini came over to them for a second, just long enough to tell Kyle to curl up when he was inside the field, because they were going to aim a little bit higher with his materialization point, figuring that it would be better to pop up in mid air than in solid ground, and they didn't know how long his fall would be.

For the first time, John saw something like fear reflected on Kyle's face as he looked at the machine that would take him away, and he wanted to offer him to back out now, give him a chance to change his mind, but he couldn't and he didn't.

When Kyle turned to him again, he said, “You gave me your mother's picture because you knew, didn't you?”

John could only nod. He couldn't speak. He couldn't tell if Kyle knowing was a relief or making everything worse. He couldn't even begin to fathom what the man was thinking of him now, of every interaction between them up to this point. If he felt betrayed already and regretted following the call John had always taken for granted he would follow.

His face wanted to twist into something he didn't want Kyle to see, so he grabbed him and pulled him into a hug, for the first time ever and the last time ever. The only time. He could feel Kyle stiffen in surprise and then, to John's mournful astonishment, he returned the embrace. “I won't fail you,” he promised, and John just wanted to cry.

Someone shouted a warning into their comm kilometers away and made him pull back. “Skynet's about to blow,” he said. “We've got a minute.”

Kyle didn't waste any more time. He dropped the rest of his clothes and John wanted to warn him about Sarah and the phone call to her mom but Bellini came over again, explaining how they had set the coordinates to match the time and place they wanted Kyle to go in exactly fifty seconds, so they had one moment to press the button. Three more people came and started smearing Kyle head to toe with a clear, gelatinous substance, explaining that apparently the machines had used this to protect the terminator's cloned skin from the energies at work, and that if a terminator needed it, a human definitely did. They were quick and effective. When they were done, Kyle quickly climbed into the contraption that would take him away with ten seconds to go, and John went with him, standing nearby. “Kyle, listen,” he said.

“Sir, we have to go!” someone said beside him and grabbed his arm. John wanted to shake them off, tell them to leave him alone, except he didn't have time for words; didn't the see that he needed to do this _now_? But they kept pulling. “It's not save here, the energies will kill us!”

It didn't even matter anymore. John had played his part, the war was over, and he had gotten Kyle to this moment of no return. But his family was waiting for him, the world needed to be rebuild, and people were clinging to him in their attempt to drag them to safety. So John let them, through the build up of energies around them. He could feel them pickle on his skin and got a very real sense of forces that could tear him apart.

Instinct took over and made him hurry down the bridge until the sensation got weaker; like he wouldn't die if he lingered there. But even as he walked backwards he yelled, “In the motel, Tiki Motel.”

Kyle looked at him as if through a hazy veil falling over the scene, hearing his words but unable to make sense of them yet. It didn't matter. “Cut the phone line!” John told him. The noise around him seemed to tear the words from his lips. “Whatever you do, don't let her call her mother! That's how he will find you!”

Could Kyle even hear him? John couldn't even hear himself. There was so much noise now. Someone pulled him backwards with a yank and he fell, just a second after the haze became so thick he couldn't see Kyle anymore.

The next second, a blast of energy tore through the room and knocked him and his companions onto their backs. When John got his bearings again, it was dark around them, all the lights out. Only the open doorway provided some illumination.

Kyle was gone. John didn't need to see it to know, but he turned on his flashlight and checked anyway, just to make sure. The device was dark and silent, but otherwise undamaged. There had been no destruction here. It was dark because Skynet was gone and the shock had fried all connected systems.

The confirmation came through the comms moments later, and then, one after the other, people started to cheer. After three decades of war, it took everyone a moment to realize it was over, but when it did, the joy and relief carried easily through their comm lines. John listened for half a minute before he turned it off.

His eyes, unbidden, fixed on the entrance, currently an empty square of pale daylight. Something inside him hoped for some shift in his memories; that his warning had reached Kyle and he had changed history after all, that neither of his parents had died and they'd just been hiding away somewhere throughout the war, ready to show up now that all was over, old but alive, and happy to see him. But no one came, as John had known they wouldn't. Nothing had changed. The warning had been lost, and he was as much of an orphan as he had always been and always would be.

“You okay?”

Looking up, he saw Hernandez. John shook his head to clear it. He hadn't even noticed his old friend joining them. “Yeah,” he said.

Hernandez looked like he didn't believe him, but then a grin cracked his weathered features. “Hey,” he said. “We've won.”

Beside the entrance stood Justin, still glaring at John, still looking angry, and lost. “Yeah,” John said again. “Looks like we have.”

  


-

  


Kate had imagined the end of the war countless times in the decades that made up most of her life. It had been impossible not to. She had tried not to think about it too much, fearing the hope it brought, but it had happened over and over. She'd imagined the last battle being won and the victory celebrations that followed. In her mind everyone had run out of the bases to be under the sky without fear for maybe the first time in their lives, and there would have been laughter and tears, joy for the end of the war and grief for those not there to see it. She had never sat down to paint these images in her mind, but they had been there none the less.

Reality was different. Victory was, for the most part, a change in the air. The final battle had been big, but the army was well prepared, and while the destruction of Skynet was a relief, it was not much of a surprise. Kate, along with almost everyone else left behind in the bunker, had been in the communication center, listening in on the lines. Her heart jumping every time she heard John's voice, or Jeanettes. Beside her, Lou, Casey, and Christine had listened as well, Casey holding on to her, and Lou and Chrissy holding on to each other. When Skynet was destroyed, Kate closed her eyes and fell silent, suddenly dizzy with relief when a part of her that had been convinced something would go wrong at the very last minute finally stopped screaming.

Then she was just overwhelmed. The war had been going on for so long, she had trouble wrapping her head around the idea that it was over. When she opened her eyes, her kids and Hernandez' daughter were all looking at her, hesitant and almost insecure, as if asking for guidance. Around them, the room was quiet as well. It was so monumental, it was as if it hadn't happened at all.

Minutes passed in silence before the first person started to laugh.

  


-

  


When Kate left the room a few minutes later, she made it three steps down the corridor before she had to stop, suddenly weak with emotions. She buried her face in her hands and thought of the sky. Outside. A chance to rebuild, to live. Her children being safe. Inside the comm center she heard Lou's voice in all the others, excitedly talking to her friend and her brother about how they should welcome back their fathers, and Jeannie, and Kyle, all of whom they had heard over the lines after the main battle was over, so they had to be okay. She started to cry then, and hurried down the corridor, not ready to talk to her children about this yet.

  


-

  


The fighters came back gradually, in small groups. Kate hesitated to call them soldiers, since many of them were not. They were simple people who had gone out to fight this one fight with the army. They hadn't accepted anyone as their leader beyond this battle, but it didn't matter. Nothing much mattered at the moment. (A lot of things would matter later.)

Some of the survivors wouldn't come back here. They had left behind their friends and families in settlements on the other end of the state for this and were now eager to return to them. There were not a lot of loved ones left in this bunker, and the soldiers had communication lines to let the base know they were alive and well, so hardly anyone was in a hurry to get back. They were taking their time because they could. Moving out in the open because they could. Maybe venturing into parts of the city too heavily guarded before, because they could.

There were still traps around, and maybe a few stray machines that hadn't been destroyed along with Skynet. One more reason to be careful and slow. It took a day for the first group to return from the battlefield, and then two more days passed for the second.

That first group consisted mostly of injured. There had been medics out there with the army, but John had insisted that the gross of them stayed at the HQ. There had been no medical station behind the lines because there was no “behind the lines”. It would have made too easy a target in that area. The only medics who went out there with the rest were those who could also fight. The only difference to the other soldiers was that they kept a little more out of the worst confrontations.

Three still died. Jim, who had taken heart and picked up a gun for this last one, was one of them.

The number of wounded was large, and for a while the remaining medics were once again too busy to think of anything else, as if the war hadn't ended. Lou and Casey and Christina still helped out; yet there was a spring to their steps that hadn't been there before, and everyone, even those in pain, were more at ease.

One time, after they had helped for hours and the most urgent tasks were done, Kate told the children to go play outside, and they did.

Kate herself didn't get to go out, for the first time since she was thirteen years old without fear, until December 24, when she stood on a pile of rubble near the main entrance to the bunker and waited for her daughter to come home. Jeanette came in a group of twenty, spread out and without hurry, though Kate noted that almost all of them still kept their weapons within reach. They had used most of the motorized vehicles that had survived the battle to transport the wounded, so pretty much everyone else was walking, but they didn't seem to mind.

Jeannie ran the last few meters and hugged her mother for a long time, and Kate finally cried, sobbing openly. She wasn't ashamed to. They cried together for a while, then Kate accompanied her exhausted child underground where Jeanette was soon tackled by her excited siblings.

John was not expected to return for another few days. The next familiar face Kate saw belonged to Justin Perry, who had been wounded but not so bad that he couldn't, or wouldn't, walk with the rest of his men.

He was sitting on a cot just outside sick bay when Kate came to him, half-naked and bandaged. All in all he didn't look too bad; mainly he appeared to be exhausted and in pain. Kate offered him painkillers, but Justin refused them with the remark that just because the war was over, their shortage of medication hadn't suddenly miraculously ended. He had walked a week with those injuries, so Kate figured it wasn't that bad and didn't insist, even though she knew how quickly the pain tended to flare up once the task at hand was over – in this case walking through a wasteland that was now, in every sense of the word, post-apocalyptic.

“You should rest,” she told him after checking his bandages. “And you can. I don't think anything too urgent will come up in the next few days. Basically, you can go back to your room and sleep until John comes back in a day or two.” She gave him a smile she didn't feel, trying not to think.

There would be a lot to do, forever.

Justin leaned against the wall and gave her no smile at all. “Kyle Reese is gone,” he said. “Did you hear?”

“Yes,” Kate replied carefully. Justin had been Kyle's commander for several years, and she knew he'd cared for him. So had some others. It was something she had forgotten, over John's connection to the young soldier, and her own. Somehow, she hadn't thought that his loss would matter so much to anyone now that the end of the war overshadowed everything else.

Somehow, she hadn't thought about this at all.

“He was a good guy,” she added, because it felt like she had to.

Justin nodded slowly. “I always thought that he would do well when the war was over. And it would have been great if he had been able to see what he fought for all his life. Turns out that wasn't ever an option.”

Kate flinched, despite herself. There was something very harsh underneath the tiredness in Justin's voice, and she wondered what exactly had happened in the last minutes of the battle. What had John given away? She hadn't thought he would openly tell everyone that Kyle had been set for this mission since before he was born, and yet here Justin was, sounding bitter, like he knew how unfair it all was.

The guilt she felt must have been written all over her face, because Justin's own face went blank as he looked at her, and then it closed off. “You knew,” he stated.

Kate said nothing.

Her old friend stared. Then he shook his head. Then he said, “I don't-” and stopped himself. Stood. Looking down at her. “What kind of people are you?” he wondered. He looked like he wanted to say more, or maybe like he wanted Kate to say something. She could have said plenty, yet none of it would have helped, or been appropriate, or meant anything.

(She thought of that day he had walked in on them, a self-proclaimed Colonel leading a troop of raggedy survivors so eager to join them.)

After a long moment, Justin turned and walked away without another word.

  


-

  


John made it back on the 29th, late at night. There were many with him, but not as many as they may have been, under different circumstances. Hernandez was there, and for that Kate would be eternally grateful. She wondered if Hernandez knew everything now. When she asked John and he shook his head without a word, she wondered if Hernandez would still be here, like this, once he knew.

Because he would know, soon. John wanted to tell everyone. He didn't want to keep carrying the guilt and the secrets behind everyone's back and bear all this adoration that, Kate knew, he felt he didn't deserve. She could have argued against that. Their people would need guidance through the years to come. They would need _his_ guidance, for there was no one better at it. She did, however, keep quiet.

For a long, long time after John had told her about his mother and her time traveler, she had thought that John and her had been in this together from the start. In reality, it had started long before she had ever entered the picture, and it wasn't her decision to make.

So she would back him up with whatever he wanted to do next. If he wanted to come clear, give his parents the recognition they deserved, and submit himself to the judgment of everyone, the judgment of their children, that was his right and she would stand by him every step of the way, even it it meant leaving their people leaderless in this time of change, or leaving them torn. New leaders would arise if they had to. The war that John had been born and raised to fight, the war that had been _his_ since before it had started, was over.

But she said nothing of that when they met one last time in their room, where they had met so many times before. She just held him as he cried in her arms.

  



	35. Epilogue: January 1st, 2030

On New Year's Even 2029, the last of the people who had wanted to return to the base that that been the army's center of operations for so many years had returned there. On New Year's Day 2030, everyone met in the great hall for something John hesitated to call a victory celebration but was exactly that. They had won. This was a celebration. People had died on the way to this moment – many people – but they were celebrating them as well.

There was not exactly a feast, but those watching over their supplies had given out considerably more food than usual, in anticipation of their new ability to go out and search the ruins for edible things without fear or hurry, and their upcoming ability to grow their own food soon. John knew that would be a struggle. The surface barely wanted to sustain life as it was. Disappointments were waiting for them throughout a long learning process, and he suspected that most of the men and women around him knew that as well, but right now they were cheering for the chance to even start.

So many challenges were waiting for them. John didn't know what part he would play in them, or even what part he _wanted_ to play. The role that had been scripted for him had run its course. What waited now was the future, unwritten.

Freedom. Even for him.

For the first time in his life he had no idea what was to come, and that was frightening because there was no guarantee they would make it, but it was also the best thing he had ever experienced.

Other parts of the world were celebrating as well. With Skynet's fall, the machines all over the globe had lost orientation. There were still some of the more sophisticated ones out there, playing out their programming – without a chance to react to the changed circumstances but still dangerous. John had warned everyone of them, and of the traps still out there. How bitter it would be to die now, when everything was over. But that was caution speaking, and not premonition. He didn't know what dangers, exactly, lay in wait for them, what monumental changes, what tragedies and triumphs would reverberate through the ages. Right here and now he was like everyone else in this room and everywhere in the world: Happy and relieved and terrified of a future he didn't know. For this moment that wouldn't last, everyone in the world who had made it through the long struggle was as one, and John reveled in that feeling of being part of that, with no more need for secrets and lies.

But the secrets he had already kept he was still keeping, and the guilt didn't go away just because it had all played out in the end. John accepted that he could not redeem himself of that guilt. All he could do was try to make up for it and repay some depths. How everyone else reacted was up to them. He wasn't going to try and steer them into any direction. It didn't matter anymore.

One of the tables that held the food and drink had already been cleared empty and John sat on it. Someone clapped him shoulder as they passed by. It happened a lot – lot of pats on the back, as if John had won this war all on his own. Kate came over and sat beside him, not saying anything. Her hand on his shoulder, for a moment, had a different meaning, and John leaned into her touch, marveling, once again, over how lucky he had been as he tried to spot his children in the crowd. Casey was nearby, overwhelmed with all the people and now coming over to sit by his mother. Earlier, he had been fooling around with some bandaged soldiers he probably knew from medical. He wasn't leaving or hiding because he wanted to be a part of this, too.

Louisa was moving between the people with a camera they now no longer needed for recon and tactical photographs. Saving the moment on Polaroid like some kid in a desert had once saved his mother's moment of grief. She hadn't taken the news of Kyle being gone very well. Neither had Casey. Now Casey was slumping against his mother in happy exhaustion and Lou was grinning as she took a picture of Chrissy jumping onto Hernandez' back, riding him piggyback with her hands in his thinning hair.

Jeanette was a little closer to the center of the room, near of the of the columns. She was smiling, too, but there was something strained about it. Whenever she looked in John's direction, her smile faded, and it was hard to tell if she looked angry or heartbroken. She was talking to Naya Rhodes, who was wearing an oversized coat with a memorable white stripe down the front that John had last seen on Captain Miranda Jones, and kept close to her friends from the 132nd. Justin Perry's partner Andrew Jackson had arrived the day before and was now balancing precariously on his crutches while holding two glasses of what was probably alcohol. He looked happy enough. Justin grinned while looking at him but his grin, too, faded when he looked in John's direction and their eyes met over the crowd. There was something hard and unforgiving in his eyes that John suspected would never go away. This was a friendship that was lost forever – maybe one of many to come.

“Hey Boss,” Hernandez said, suddenly right before him and dropping his daughter back to the ground. “Aren't you going to give a speech? I think people have been waiting.”

John didn't want to give a speech. He didn't feel like that was his place anymore, felt like everything he could say now on the war and the victory would be pretentious and hollow. But he also knew he had to say _something_. People were waiting to hear from him, as a signal that it was truly over.

Even now they were falling silent around him, and the silence was traveling through the hall like a wave. Everyone was looking at him. The hardness in Justin's eyes turned to open challenge that John pretended not to see.

He looked at everyone. He saw everyone; the faces familiar and unfamiliar, the lines of exhaustion and grief underneath the joy, the bandages and the mementos worn around necks and clutched in bony hands. The expectation.

“I don't want to make a speech,” he said, loud and clear so that everyone could hear him. “This is not a time for speeches, nor am I the person the give it. What could I say that you don't already know? The war is over. This war that has dominated our lives for decades, that has destroyed our world and was all many of you ever knew no longer is, and the world is already changing for the better. There will be hardships – you all know that. The old world won't rise from the ashes of this one and it it up to us to create something new that we can live in and can live with. This new age we are witnessing the beginning of is one of opportunities instead of survival. I could warn you of the dangers this holds, but I am afraid that we will have to walk right into those to find all of them.” This got him a few laughs, and he smiled as if he had meant it as a joke. “It's hard to talk about things that haven't happened yet. We will get to plan and shape this new world soon enough – or someone will do it, anyway. I may not be among them.”

He lifted his hands when calls of protest ran through the room. “I could thank you for your efforts, your bravery, and your sacrifices at this point, but that would indicate you had done this for me, and you haven't. You have fought for yourself, for your loved ones, and for the future. And you have won this war for yourselves. So I can can only thank you not as your General, but as one of the people who live, whose families live, because of your fight, and because of the fight of all the people who did not make it to this moment. Everyone who ever sacrificed their life, or their health, so that others may get the chance to continue this fight to its conclusion. Or just so that others may live. I know you will never forget them. I won't.”

There was a moment of silence in the hall, before someone said, “I don't know, that sounded like a speech to _me_ ,” making everyone chuckle again.

John searched the crowd for his children once more, knowing what was to come would hurt not only him, but that he would do it none the less.

Beside him, the woman he loved, took his hand, holding it like she had through all these years.

“That's right,” he admitted. “Sorry, that got away from me there.” More chuckles. He shook his head, keeping his voice light. “I didn't want to give a speech, even if I did give one. What I would like to do, on this first day of the first year after the war, is tell you a story. One that I have never told before.”

That got some reaction. People looked interested. They loved his stories; for a long time his stories had been the best entertainment they'd had. His stories had created legends.

“About your mother?” someone asked, though it wasn't really a question. All of John's stories were about his mother.

“About that time she broke you out of a police station?” someone else asked, because that was not an experience John had ever given them details on and it had always tickled their imagination.

“About the start of the war? How she saved your life?”

There were appreciative murmurs all over. This was something that people wanted to hear. The heroic last moments of Sarah Connor, shaping the future by saving her son so he could save them. It wasn't something John had ever shared beyond mentioning that it happened, and he shook his head now. “No,” he said. “Nothing like that. It's...” He trailed off and did have to smile when he realized what it was, in the end. “I guess you could say it's a love story.”

He looked at the faces around him. Everyone looked surprised. Some looked intrigued. Love still existed in this world, but it was all too often pushed into the background by a life that left no room for romance. This, right here, this story could be like a sign that the times were changing and the world would be a better place.

Yet a great many looked somewhat disappointed, having hoped for action and heroics and another chapter to the legend of Sarah Connor. John snorted softly and smiled again, wistfully and almost against his will. “Don't worry,” he told them. “My mother is in it, too.”

  


2 July 2016

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it. All that's left is to express my thanks to the few readers who have supproted me with their kind comments throughout this story. You're more awesome than you probably know!
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> On an unrelated note, I am also using this fic as a fill for my [genprompt-bingo card](http://vail-kagami.dreamwidth.org/13399.html), for the prompt _That Moment (incident/chapter/episode) examined/rewritten_.


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